


Won't stop till we surrender... ("Given a chance" sequel)

by arrowtomyheart



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Based on Book, M/M, Sequel of Given a chance..., for everyone who wanted it, here it is, whole sequel is Harry's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 08:41:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 55,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4428824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arrowtomyheart/pseuds/arrowtomyheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been three years since the devastating accident ... three years since Louis walked out of Harry's life forever.<br/>Now living on opposite continents, Louis is Oxford's rising star and Harry is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock star status and celebrity "girlfriend". When Harry get stuck in New York by himself, chance brings the couple together again, for one last night. As they explore the city that has become Louis' home for few nights, Harry and Louis revisit the past and open their hearts to the future-and each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ONE

**Author's Note:**

> Hiii again!  
> As promised here is the sequel of [Given a chance...](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4144503?view_full_work=true/), hope you'll enjoy this part as much as i enjoyed it, somehow in a way i like sequel better ;))  
> Have a fun reading!
> 
> P.S. as I mentioned before I do not, in any kind of way, own this, I'm just turning a beautiful book into a fan-fic.

 

 

Shadows come with the pain that you’re running from

Love was something you never heard enough

Yeah it took me some time but I figured out

How to fix up a heart that I let down

“WHERE DO BROKEN HEARTS GO”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 3

Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It’s just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don’t know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk—or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I’m not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you’d think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I’ll get through today.

This morning, after my daily prodding, I glance at the minimalist digital clock on the hotel nightstand. It reads 11:47, positively crack-of-dawn for me. But the front desk has already rang with two wake-up calls, followed by a polite-but-firm buzz from our manager, Paul. Today might be just one day, but it’s packed.

I’m due at the studio to lay down a few final guitar tracks for some Internet-only version of the first single of our just-released album. Such a gimmick. Same song, new guitar track, some vocal effects, pay an extra buck for it. “These days, you’ve gotta milk a dollar out of every dime,” the suits at the label are so fond of reminding us.

After the studio, I have a lunch interview with some reporter from Shuffle. Those two events are kinda like the bookends of what my life has become: making the music, which I like, and talking about making the music, which I loathe. But they’re flip sides of the same coin. When Paul calls a second time I finally kick off the duvet and grab the prescription bottle from the side table. It’s some anti-anxiety thing I’m supposed to take when I’m feeling jittery.

Jittery is how I normally feel. Jittery I’ve gotten used to. But ever since we kicked off our tour with three shows at Madison Square Garden, I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful. Vortexy.

Is that even a word? I ask myself.

You’re talking to yourself, so who the hell cares? I reply, popping a couple of pills. I pull on some boxers, and go to the door of my room, where a pot of tea is already waiting. It’s been left there by a hotel employee, undoubtedly under strict instructions to stay out of my way.

I finish my tea, get dressed, and make my way down the service elevator and out the side entrance—the guest-relations manager has kindly provided me with special access keys so I can avoid the scenester parade in the lobby. Out on the sidewalk, I’m greeted by a blast of steaming New York air. It’s kind of oppressive, but I like that the air is wet. It reminds me of Doncaster, where the rain falls endlessly, and even on the hottest of summer days, blooming white cumulus clouds float above, their shadows reminding you that summer’s heat is fleeting, and the rain’s never far off.

In Los Angeles, where I live now, it hardly ever rains. And the heat, it’s never-ending. But it’s a dry heat. People there use this aridness as a blanket excuse for all of the hot, smoggy city’s excesses. “It may be a hundred and seven degrees today,” they’ll brag, “but at least it’s a dry heat.”

But New York is a wet heat; by the time I reach the studio ten blocks away on a desolate stretch in the West Fifties, my hair, which I keep hidden under a hat, is damp. I pull a cigarette from my pocket and my hand shakes as I light up. I’ve had a slight tremor for the last year or so. After extensive medical checks, the doctors declared it nothing more than nerves and advised me to try yoga.

When I get to the studio, Paul is waiting outside under the awning. He looks at me, at my cigarette, back at my face. I can tell by the way that he’s eyeballing me, he’s trying to decide whether he needs to be Good Cop or Bad Cop. I must look like shit because he opts for Good Cop.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” he says jovially.

“Yeah? What’s ever good about morning?” I try to make it sound like a joke.

“Technically, it’s afternoon now. We’re running late.”

I stub out my cigarette. Paul puts a giant paw on my shoulder, incongruously gentle. “We just want one guitar track on ‘No Control,’ just to give it that little something extra so fans buy it all over again.” He laughs, shakes his head at what the business has become. “Then you have lunch with Shuffle, and we have a photo shoot for that Fashion Rocks thing for the Times with the rest of the band around five, and then a quick drinks thing with some money guys at the label, and then I’m off to the airport. Tomorrow, you have a quick little meeting with publicity and merchandising. Just smile and don’t say a lot. After that you’re on your lonesome until London.”

On my lonesome? As opposed to being in the warm bosom of family when we’re all together? I say. Only I say it to myself. More and more lately it seems as though the majority of my conversations are with myself. Given half the stuff I think, that’s probably a good thing.

But this time I really will be by myself. Paul and the rest of the band are flying to England tonight. I was supposed to be on the same flight as them until I realized that today was Friday the thirteenth, and I was like no fucking way! I’m dreading this tour enough as is, so I’m not jinxing it further by leaving on the official day of bad luck. So I’d had Paul book me a day later. We’re shooting a video in London and then doing a bunch of press before we start the European leg of our tour, so it’s not like I’m missing a show, just a preliminary meeting with our video director. I don’t need to hear about his artistic vision. When we start shooting, I’ll do what he tells me.

I follow Paul into the studio and enter a soundproof booth where it’s just me and a row of guitars. On the other side of the glass sit our producer, Julian, and the sound engineers. Paul joins them. “Okay, Harry,” says Julian, “one more track on the bridge and the chorus. Just to make that hook that much more sticky. We’ll play with the vocals in the mixing.”

“Hooky. Sticky. Got it.” I put on my headphones and pick up my guitar to tune up and warm up. I try not to notice that in spite of what Paul said a few minutes ago, it feels like I’m already all on my lonesome. Me alone in a soundproof booth. Don’t overthink it, I tell myself. This is how you record in a technologically advanced studio. The only problem is, I felt the same way a few nights ago at the Garden. Up onstage, in front of eighteen thousand fans, alongside the people who, once upon a time, were part of my family, I felt as alone as I do in this booth.

Still, it could be worse. I start to play and my fingers nimble up and I get off the stool and bang and crank against my guitar, pummel it until it screeches and screams just the way I want it to. Or almost the way I want it to. There’s probably a hundred grand’s worth of guitars in this room, but none of them sound as good as my old Les Paul Junior—the guitar I’d had for ages, the one I’d recorded our first albums on, the one that, in a fit of stupidity or hubris or whatever, I’d allowed to be auctioned off for charity. The shiny, expensive replacements have never sounded or felt quite right. Still, when I crank it up loud, I do manage to lose myself for a second or two.

But it’s over all too soon, and then Julian and the engineers are shaking my hand and wishing me luck on tour, and Paul is shepherding me out the door and into a town car and we’re whizzing down Ninth Avenue to SoHo, to a hotel whose restaurant the publicists from our record label have decided is a good spot for our interview. What, do they think I’m less likely to rant or say something alienating if I’m in an expensive public place? I remember back in the very early days, when the interviewers wrote ’zines or blogs and were fans and mostly wanted to rock-talk—to discuss the music—and they wanted to speak to all of us together. More often than not, it just turned into a normal conversation with everyone shouting their opinions over one another. Back then I never worried about guarding my words. But now the reporters interrogate me and the band separately, as though they’re cops and they have me and my accomplices in adjacent cells and are trying to get us to implicate one another.

I need a cigarette before we go in, so Paul and I stand outside the hotel in the blinding midday sun as a crowd of people gathers and checks me out while pretending not to. That’s the difference between New York and the rest of the world. People are just as celebrity-crazed as anywhere, but New Yorkers—or at least the ones who consider themselves sophisticates and loiter along the kind of SoHo block I’m standing on now—put on this pretense that they don’t care, even as they stare out from their three-hundred-dollar shades. Then they act all disdainful when out-of-towners break the code by rushing up and asking for an autograph as a pair of girls in U Michigan sweatshirts have just done, much to the annoyance of the nearby trio of snobs, who watch the girls and roll their eyes and give me a look of sympathy. As if the girls are the problem.

“We need to get you a better disguise, Wild Styles,” Paul says, after the girls, giggling with excitement, flutter away. He’s the only one who’s allowed to call me that anymore. Before it used to be a general nickname, a takeoff on my last name, Styles. But once I sort of trashed a hotel room and after that “Wild Styles” became an unshakable tabloid moniker.

Then, as if on cue, a photographer shows up. You can’t stand in front of a high-end hotel for more than three minutes before that happens. “Harry! Kendall inside?” A photo of me and Kendall is worth about quadruple one of me alone. But after the first flash goes off, Paul shoves one hand in front of the guy’s lens, and another in front of my face.

As he ushers me inside, he preps me. “The reporter is named Vanessa LeGrande. She’s not one of those grizzled types you hate. She’s young. Not younger than you, but early twenties, I think. Used to write for a blog before she got tapped by Shuffle.”

“Which blog?” I interrupt. Paul rarely gives me detailed rundowns on reporters unless there’s a reason.

“Not sure. Maybe Gabber.”

“Oh, Paul, that’s a piece-of-crap gossip site.”

“Shuffle isn’t a gossip site. And this is the cover exclusive.”

“Fine. Whatever,” I say, pushing through the restaurant doors. Inside it’s all low steel-and-glass tables and leather banquettes, like a million other places I’ve been to. These restaurants think so highly of themselves, but really they’re just overpriced, overstylized versions of McDonald’s.

“There she is, corner table, the blonde with the streaks,” Paul says. “She’s a sweet little number. Not that you have a shortage of sweet little numbers. Shit, don’t tell Kendall I said that. Okay, forget it. I’ll be up here at the bar.”

Paul staying for the interview? That’s a publicist’s job, except that I refused to be chaperoned by publicists. I must really seem off-kilter. “You babysitting?” I ask.

“Nope. Just thought you could use some backup.”

Vanessa LeGrande is cute. Or maybe hot is a more accurate term. It doesn’t matter. I can tell by the way she licks her lips and tosses her hair back that she knows it, and that pretty much ruins the effect. A tattoo of a snake runs up her wrist, and I’d bet our platinum album that she has a tramp stamp. Sure enough, when she reaches into her bag for her digital recorder, peeping up from the top of her low-slung jeans is a small inked arrow pointing south. Classy.

“Hey, Harry,” Vanessa says, looking at me conspiratorially, like we’re old buddies. “Can I just say I’m a huge fan? Stockholm Syndrome got me through a devastating breakup senior year of college. So, thank you.” She smiles at me.

“Uh, you’re welcome.”

“And now I’d like to return the favor by writing the best damn profile of White Eskimo ever to hit the page. So how about we get down to brass tacks and blow this thing right out of the water?”

Get down to brass tacks? Do people even understand half the crap that comes spilling out of their mouths? Vanessa may be attempting to be brassy or sassy or trying to win me over with candor or show me how real she is, but whatever it is she’s selling, I’m not buying. “Sure,” is all I say.

A waiter comes to take our order. Vanessa orders a salad; I order a beer. Vanessa flips through a Moleskine notebook. “I know we’re supposed to be talking about No Control . . .” she begins.

Immediately, I frown. That’s exactly what we’re supposed to be talking about. That’s why I’m here. Not to be friends. Not to swap secrets, but because it’s part of my job to promote White Eskimo’s albums.

Vanessa turns on her siren. “I’ve been listening to it for weeks, and I’m a fickle, hard-to-please girl.” She laughs. In the distance, I hear Paul clear his throat. I look at him. He’s wearing a giant fake smile and giving me a thumbs-up. He looks ludicrous. I turn to Vanessa and force myself to smile back. “But now that your second major-label album is out and your harder sound is, I think we can all agree, established, I’m wanting to write a definitive survey. To chart your evolution from emocore band to the scions of agita-rock.”

Scions of agita-rock? This self-important wankjob deconstructionist crap was something that really threw me in the beginning. As far as I was concerned, I wrote songs: chords and beats and lyrics, verses and bridges and hooks. But then, as we got bigger, people began to dissect the songs, like a frog from biology class until there was nothing left but guts—tiny parts, so much less than the sum.

I roll my eyes slightly, but Vanessa’s focused on her notes. “I was listening to some bootlegs of your really early stuff. It’s so poppy, almost sweet comparatively. And I’ve been reading everything ever written about you guys, every blog post, every ’zine article. And almost everyone refers to this so-called White Eskimo “black hole,” but no one really ever penetrates it. You have your little indie release; it does well; you were poised for the big leagues, but then this lag. Rumors were that you’d broken up. And then comes Stockholm Syndrome. And pow.” Vanessa mimes an explosion coming out of her closed fists.

It’s a dramatic gesture, but not entirely off base. Stockholm Syndrome came out two years ago, and within a month of its release, the single “18” had broken onto the national charts and gone viral. We used to joke you couldn’t listen to the radio for longer than an hour without hearing it. Then “Fireproof” catapulted onto the charts, and soon after the entire album was climbing to the number-one album slot on iTunes, which in turn made every Walmart in the country stock it, and soon it was bumping Lady Gaga off the number-one spot on the Billboard charts. For a while it seemed like the album was loaded onto the iPod of every person between the ages of twelve and twenty-four. Within a matter of months, our half-forgotten Doncaster band was on the cover of Time magazine being touted as “The Millennials’ Nirvana.”

But none of this is news. It had all been documented, over and over again, ad nauseam, including in Shuffle. I’m not sure where Vanessa is going with it.

“You know, everyone seems to attribute the harder sound to the fact that Julian Bunetta produced Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Right,” I say. “Julian likes to rock.”

Vanessa takes a sip of water. I can hear her tongue ring click. “But Julian didn’t write those lyrics, which are the foundation for all that oomph. You did. All that raw power and emotion. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome is the angstiest album of the decade.”

“And to think, we were going for the happiest.”

Vanessa looks up at me, narrows her eyes. “I meant it as a compliment. It was very cathartic for a lot of people, myself included. And that’s my point. Everyone knows something went down during your ‘black hole.’ It’s going to come out eventually, so why not control the message? Who does the ‘stockholm syndrome’ refer to?” she asks, making air quotes. “What happened with you guys? With you?”

Our waiter delivers Vanessa’s salad. I order a second beer and don’t answer her question. I don’t say anything, just keep my eyes cast downward. Because Vanessa’s right about one thing. We do control the message. In the early days, we got asked this question all the time, but we just kept the answers vague: took a while to find our sound, to write our songs. But now the band’s big enough that our publicists issue a list of no-go topics to reporters: Liam and Sophia’s relationship, mine and Kendall’s, including my sexuality, Zayn’s former drug problems—and the White Eskimo’s “black hole.” But Vanessa apparently didn’t get the memo. I glance over at Paul for some help, but he’s in deep conversation with the bartender. So much for backup.

“The title refers to kidnapping,” I say. “We’ve explained that before.”

“Right,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Because your lyrics are so political.”

Vanessa stares at me with those big baby blues. This is a reporter’s technique: create an awkward silence and wait for your subject to fill it in with babble. It won’t work with me, though. I can outstare anyone.

Vanessa’s eyes suddenly go cold and hard. She abruptly puts her breezy, flirty personality on the back burner and stares at me with hard ambition. She looks hungry, but it’s an improvement because at least she’s being herself. “What happened, Harry? I know there’s a story there, the story of White Eskimo, and I’m going to be the one to tell it. What turned this indie-pop band into a primal rock phenomenon?”

I feel a cold hard fist in my stomach. “Life happened. And it took us a while to write the new stuff—”

“Took you a while,” Vanessa interrupts. “You wrote both the recent albums.”

I just shrug.

“Come on, Harry! Stockholm Syndrome is your record. It’s a masterpiece. You should be proud of it. And I just know the story behind it, behind your band, is your story, too. A huge shift like this, from collaborative indie quartet to star-driven emotional punk powerhouse—it’s all on you. I mean you alone were the one up at the Grammys accepting the award for Best Song. What did that feel like?”

Like shit. “In case you forgot, the whole band won Best New Artist. And that was more than a year ago.”

She nods. “Look, I’m not trying to diss anybody or reopen wounds. I’m just trying to understand the shift. In sound. In lyrics. In band dynamics.” She gives me a knowing look. “All signs point to you being the catalyst.”

“There’s no catalyst. We just tinkered with our sound. Happens all the time. Like Dylan going electric. Like Liz Phair going commercial. But people tend to freak out when something diverges from their expectations.”

“I just know there’s something more to it,” Vanessa continues, pushing forward against the table so hard that it shoves into my gut and I have to physically push it back.

“Well, you’ve obviously got your theory, so don’t let the truth get in the way.”

Her eyes flash for a quick second and I think I’ve pissed her off, but then she puts her hands up. Her nails are bitten down. “Actually, you want to know my theory?” she drawls.

Not particularly. “Lay it on me.”

“I talked to some people you went to high school with.”

I feel my entire body freeze up, soft matter hardening into lead. It takes extreme concentration to lift the glass to my lips and pretend to take a sip.

“I didn’t realize that you went to the same high school as Louis Tomlinson,” she says lightly. “You know him? The pianist? He’s starting to get a lot of buzz in that world. Or whatever the equivalent of buzz is in classical music. Perhaps hum.”

The glass shakes in my hand. I have to use my other hand to help lower it to the table to keep from spilling all over myself. All the people who really know what actually had happened back then aren’t talking, I remind myself. Rumors, even true ones, are like flames: Stifle the oxygen and they sputter and die.

“Our high school had a good arts program. It was kind of a breeding ground for musicians,” I explain.

“That makes sense,” Vanessa says, nodding. “There’s a vague rumor that you and Louis were a couple in high school. Which was funny because I’d never read about it anywhere and it certainly seems noteworthy.”

An image of Louis flashes before my eyes. Seventeen years old, those blue eyes full of love, intensity, fear, music, sex, magic, grief. His freezing hands. My own freezing hands, now still grasping the glass of ice water.

“It would be noteworthy if it were true,” I say, forcing my voice into an even tone. I take another gulp of water and signal the waiter for another beer. It’s my third, the dessert course of my liquid lunch.

“So it’s not?” She sounds skeptical.

“Wishful thinking,” I reply. “We knew each other casually from school.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t get anyone who really knew either of you to corroborate it. But then I got a hold of an old yearbook and there’s a sweet shot of the two of you. You look pretty coupley. The thing is, there’s no name with the photo, just a caption. So unless you know what Louis looks like, you might miss it.”

Thank you, Hannah Walker: Louis’ best friend, yearbook queen, paparazzo. We hadn’t wanted that picture used, but Hannah had snuck it in by not listing our names with it, just that stupid nickname.

“Groovy and the Geek?” Vanessa asks. “You guys even had a handle.”

“You’re using high school yearbooks as your source? What next? Wikipedia?”

“You’re hardly a reliable source. You said you knew each other ‘casually.’”

“Look, the truth is we maybe hooked up for a few weeks, right when those pictures got taken. But, hey, I dated a lot of boys in high school.” I give her my best playboy smirk.

“So you haven’t seen him since school then?”

“Not since he left for college,” I say. That part, at least, is true.

“So how come when I interviewed the rest of your bandmates, they went all no comment when I asked about him?” she asks, eyeing me hard.

Because whatever else has gone wrong with us, we’re still loyal. About that. I force myself to speak out loud: “Because there’s nothing to tell. I think people like you like the sitcom aspect of, you know, two well-known musicians from the same high school being a couple.”

“People like me?” Vanessa asks.

Vultures. Bloodsuckers. Soul-stealers. “Reporters,” I say. “You’re fond of fairy tales.”

“Well, who isn’t?” Vanessa says. “Although that man’s life has been anything but a fairy tale. He lost his whole family in a car crash.”

Vanessa mock shudders the way you do when you talk about someone’s misfortunes that have nothing to do with you, that don’t touch you, and never will. I’ve never hit a woman in my life, but for one minute I want to punch her in the face, give her a taste of the pain she’s so casually describing. But I hold it together and she carries on, clueless. “Speaking of fairy tales, are you and Kendall Jenner having a baby? I keep seeing her in all the tabloids’ bump watches.”

“No,” I reply. “Not that I know of.” I’m damn sure Vanessa knows that Kendall is off-limits, but if talking about Kendall’s supposed pregnancy will distract her, then I’ll do it.

“Not that you know of? You’re still together, right?”

God, the hunger in her eyes. For all her talk of writing definitive surveys, for all her investigative skills, she’s no different from all the other hack journalists and stalker photographers, dying to be the first to deliver a big scoop, either on pregnancy: Is It Twins for Harry and Kendall? Or a death: Kendall Tells His Wild Styles: “It’s Quits!” Neither story is true, but some weeks I see both of them on the covers of different gossip rags at the same time.

I think of the house in L.A. that Kendall and I share. Or coinhabit. I can’t remember the last time the two of us were there together at the same time for more than a week. She makes two, three shows a day, and she just started her own fashion company. So between runway shows and promoting her fashion line and chasing down properties to produce, and me being in the studio and on tour, we seem to be on opposing schedules.

“Yep, Kendall and I are still together,” I tell Vanessa. “And we are not expecting. She’s just into those kid shops to buy presents for her niece these days, so everyone always assumes it’s to have a baby of her own. It’s not.”

Truth be told, I sometimes wonder if Kendall goes to those shops on purpose, to court the bump watch as a way to tempt fate. She seriously wants a kid. Even though publicly, Kendall is twenty-four, in reality, she’s twenty-eight and she claims her clock is ticking and all that. But I’m twenty-one, and Kendall and I have only been publicly together a year. And I don’t care if Kendall says that I have an old soul and have been through a lifetime already. Even if I were forty-one, and Kendall and I had just celebrated twenty years together, I wouldn’t want a kid with her.

“Will she be joining you on the tour?”

At the mere mention of the tour, I feel my throat start to close up. The tour is sixty-seven nights long. Sixty-seven . I mentally pat for my pill bottle, grow calmer knowing it’s there, but am smarter than to sneak one in front of Vanessa.

“Huh?” I ask.

“Is Kendall going to come meet you on the tour at all?”

I imagine Kendall on tour, with her stylists, her Pilates instructors, her latest raw-foods diet. “Maybe.”

“How do you like living in Los Angeles?” Vanessa asks. “You don’t seem like the SoCal type.”

“It’s a dry heat,” I reply.

“What?”

“Nothing. A joke.”

“Oh. Right.” Vanessa eyes me skeptically. I no longer read interviews about myself, but when I used to, words like inscrutable were often used. And arrogant. Is that really how people see me?

Thankfully, our allotted hour is up. She closes her notebook and calls for the check. I catch Pauls’s relieved-looking eyes to let him know we’re wrapping up.

“It was nice meeting you, Harry,” she says.

“Yeah, you too,” I lie.

“I gotta say, you’re a puzzle.” She smiles and her teeth gleam an unnatural white. “But I like puzzles. Like your lyrics, all those grisly images on Stockholm Syndrome. And the lyrics on the new record, also very cryptic. You know some critics question whether Ready To Run can match the intensity of Stockholm Syndrome. . . .”

I know what’s coming. I’ve heard this before. It’s this thing that reporters do. Reference other critics’ opinions as a backhanded way to espouse their own. And I know what she’s really asking, even if she doesn’t: How does it feel that the only worthy thing you ever created came from the worst kind of loss?

Suddenly, it’s all too much. Kendall and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing’s sacred. Everything’s fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me. Sixty-seven nights. Sixty-seven, sixty-seven. I push the table hard so that glasses of water and beer go clattering into her lap.

“What the—?”

“This interview’s over,” I growl.

“I know that. Why are you freaking out on me?”

“Because you’re nothing but a vulture! This has fuck all to do with music. It’s about picking everything apart.”

Vanessa’s eyes dance as she fumbles for her recorder. Before she has a chance to turn it back on, I pick it up and slam it against the table, shattering it, and then dump it into a glass of water for good measure. My hand is shaking and my heart is pounding and I feel the beginnings of a panic attack, the kind that makes me sure I’m about to die.

“What did you just do?” Vanessa screams. “I don’t have a backup.”

“Good.”

“How am I supposed to write my article now?”

“You call that an article?”

“Yeah. Some of us have to work for a living, you prissy, temperamental ass—”

“Harry!” Paul is at my side, laying a trio of hundred-dollar bills on the table. “For a new one,” he says to Vanessa, before ushering me out of the restaurant and into a taxi. He throws another hundred-dollar bill at the driver after he balks at my lighting up. Paul reaches into my pocket and grabs my prescription bottle, shakes a tablet into his hand, and says, “Open up,” like some bearish mother.

He waits until we’re a few blocks from my hotel, until I’ve sucked down two cigarettes in one continuous inhale and popped another anxiety pill. “What happened back there?”

I tell him. Her questions about the “black hole.” Kendall. Louis.

“Don’t worry. We can call Shuffle. Threaten to pull their exclusive if they don’t put a different reporter on the piece. And maybe this gets into the tabloids or Gabber for a few days, but it’s not much of a story. It’ll blow over.”

Paul is saying all this stuff calmly, like, hey, it’s only rock ’n’ roll, but I can read the worry in his eyes.

“I can’t, Paul.”

“Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to. It’s just an article. It’ll be handled.”

“Not just that. I can’t do it. Any of it.”

Paul, who I don’t think has slept a full night since he toured with Aerosmith, allows himself to look exhausted for a few seconds. Then he goes back to manager mode. “You’ve just got pretour burnout. Happens to the best of ’em,” he assures me. “Once you get on the road, in front of the crowds, start to feel the love, the adrenaline, the music, you’ll be energized. I mean, hell, you’ll be fried for sure, but happy-fried. And come November, when this is over, you can go veg out on an island somewhere where nobody knows who you are, where nobody gives a shit about White Eskimo. Or wild Harry Styles.”

November? It’s August now. That’s three months. And the tour is sixty-seven nights. Sixty-seven. I repeat it in my head like a mantra, except it does the opposite of what a mantra’s supposed to do. It makes me want to grab fistfuls of my hair and yank.

And how do I tell Paul, how do I tell any of them, that the music, the adrenaline, the love, all the things that mitigate how hard this has become, all of that’s gone? All that’s left is this vortex. And I’m right on the edge of it.

My entire body is shaking. I’m losing it. A day might be just twenty-four hours but sometimes getting through just one seems as impossible as scaling Everest.


	2. TWO

I know you said that you don’t like it complicated

That we should try to keep it simple,

But love is never ever simple no

 “CLOUDS”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 12

Paul leaves me in front of my hotel. “Look, man, I think you just need some time to chill. So, listen: I’m gonna clear the schedule for the rest of the day and cancel your meetings tomorrow. Your flight to London’s not till seven; you don’t have to be at the airport till five.” He glances at his phone. “That’s more than twenty-four hours to do whatever you want to. I promise you, you’ll feel so much better. Just go be free.”

Paul is peering at me with a look of calculated concern. He’s my friend, but I’m also his responsibility. “I’m gonna change my flight,” he announces. “I’ll fly with you tomorrow.”

I’m embarrassed by how grateful I am. Flying Upper Class with the band is no great shakes. We all tend to stay plugged into our own luxury pods, but at least when I fly with them, I’m not alone. When I fly alone, who knows who I’ll be seated next to? I once had a Japanese businessman who didn’t stop talking to me at all during a ten-hour flight. I’d wanted to be moved but hadn’t wanted to seem like the kind of rock-star prick who’d ask to be moved, so I’d sat there, nodding my head, not understanding half of what he was saying. But worse yet are the times when I’m truly alone for those long-haul flights.

I know Paul has lots to do in London. More to the point, missing tomorrow’s meeting with the rest of the band and the video director will be one more little earthquake. But whatever. There are too many fault lines to count now. Besides, nobody blames Paul; they blame me.

So, it’s a huge imposition to let Paul spend an extra day in New York. But I still accept his offer, even as I downplay his generosity by muttering, “Okay.”

“Cool. You clear your head. I’ll leave you alone, won’t even call. Want me to pick you up here or meet you at the airport?” The rest of the band is staying downtown. We’ve gotten into the habit of staying in separate hotels since the last tour, and Paul diplomatically alternates between staying at my hotel and theirs. This time he’s with them.

“Airport. I’ll meet you in the lounge,” I tell him.

“Okay then. I’ll order you a car for four. Until then, just chill.” He gives me a half handshake, half hug and then he’s back inside the cab, zooming off to his next order of business, probably mending the fences that I’ve thrashed today.

I go around to the service entrance and make my way to my hotel room. I take a shower, ponder going back to sleep. But these days, sleep eludes me even with a medicine cabinet full of psychopharmacological assistance. From the eighteenth-story windows, I can see the afternoon sun bathing the city in a warm glow, making New York feel cozy somehow, but making the suite feel claustrophobic and hot. I throw on a clean pair of jeans and my lucky white T-shirt. I wanted to reserve this shirt for tomorrow when I leave for the tour, but I feel like I need some luck right now, so it’s gonna have to pull double duty.

I turn on my iPhone. There are fifty-nine new email messages and seventeen new voice mails, including several from the label’s now-certainly irate publicist and a bunch from Kendall, asking how it went in the studio and with the interview. I could call her, but what’s the point? If I tell her about Vanessa LeGrande, she’ll get all upset with me for losing my “public face” in front of a reporter. She’s trying to train me out of that bad habit. She says every time I lose it in front of the press, I only whet their appetites for more. “Give them a dull public face, Harry, and they’ll stop writing so much about you,” she constantly advises me. The thing is, I have a feeling if I told Kendall which question set me off, she’d probably lose her public face, too.

I think about what Paul said about getting away from it all, and I turn off the phone and toss it on the nightstand. Then I grab my hat, shades, my pills, and wallet and am out the door. I turn up Columbus, making my way toward Central Park. A fire truck barrels by, its sirens whining. Scratch your head or you’ll be dead. I don’t even remember where I learned that childhood rhyme or the dictum that demanded you scratch your head every time you heard a siren, lest the next siren be for you. But I do know when I started doing it, and now it’s become second nature. Still, in a place like Manhattan, where the sirens are always blaring, it can become exhausting to keep up.

It’s early evening now and the aggressive heat has mellowed, and it’s like everyone senses that it’s safe to go out because they’re mobbing the place: spreading out picnics on the lawn, pushing jogging strollers up the paths, floating in canoes along the lily-padded lake.

Much as I like seeing all the people doing their thing, it all makes me feel exposed. I don’t get how other people in the public eye do it. Sometimes I see pictures of Brad Pitt with his gaggle of kids in Central Park, just playing on swings, and clearly he was followed by paparazzi but he still looks like he’s having a normal day with his family. Or maybe not. Pictures can be pretty deceptive.

Thinking about all this and passing happy people enjoying a summer evening, I start to feel like a moving target, even though I have my cap pulled low and my shades are on and I’m without Kendall. When Kendall and I are together, it’s almost impossible to fly under the radar. I’m seized with this paranoia, not even so much that I’ll get photographed or hounded by a mob of autograph seekers—though I really don’t want to deal with that right now—but that I’ll be mocked as the only person in the entire park who’s alone, even though this obviously isn’t the case. But still, I feel like any second people will start pointing, making fun of me.

So, this is how it’s become? This is what I’ve become? A walking contradiction? I’m surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it’s like I don’t know what to do with it, don’t know how to be a normal person anymore.

I wander toward the Ramble, where the only people I’m likely to bump into are the kind who don’t want to be found. I buy a couple of hot dogs and down them in a few bites, and it’s only then that I realize I haven’t eaten all day, which makes me think about lunch—and the Vanessa LeGrande debacle.

What happened back there? I mean, you’ve been known to get testy with reporters, but that was just an amateur-hour move, I tell myself.

I’m just tired, I justify. Overtaxed. I think of the tour and it’s like the mossy ground next to me opens up and starts whirring.

Sixty-seven nights. I try to rationalize it. Sixty-seven nights is nothing. I try to divide up the number, to fractionalize it, to do something to make it smaller, but nothing divides evenly into sixty-seven. So I break it up. Fourteen countries, thirty-nine cities, a few hundred hours on a tour bus. But the math just makes the whirring go faster and I start to feel dizzy. I grab hold of the tree trunk and run my hand against the bark, which reminds me of Doncaster and makes the earth at least close up for the time being.

I can’t help but think about how, when I was younger, I’d read about the legions of artists who imploded— Morrison, Joplin, Cobain, Hendrix. They disgusted me. They got what they wanted and then what did they do? Drugged themselves to oblivion. Or shot their heads off. What a bunch of assholes.

Well, take a look at yourself now. You’re no junkie but you’re not much better.

I would change if I could, but so far, ordering myself to shut up and enjoy the ride hasn’t had much of an impact. If the people around me knew how I feel, they’d laugh at me. No, that’s not true. Kendall wouldn’t laugh. She’d be baffled by my inability to bask in what I’ve worked so hard to accomplish.

But have I worked so hard? There’s this assumption among my family, Kendall, the rest of the band—well, at least there used to be among those guys—that I somehow deserve all this, that the acclaim and wealth is payback. I’ve never really bought that. Karma’s not like a bank. Make a deposit, take a withdrawal. But more and more, I am starting to suspect that all this is payback for something—only not the good kind.

I reach for a cigarette, but my pack’s empty. I stand up and dust off my jeans and make my way out of the park. The sun is starting to dip to the west, a bright blaring ball tilting toward the Hudson and leaving a collage of peach and purple streaks across the sky. It really is pretty and for a second I force myself to admire it.

I turn south on Seventh, stop at a deli, grab some smokes, and then head downtown. I’ll go back to the hotel, get some room service, maybe fall asleep early for once. Outside Carnegie Hall, taxis are pulling up, dropping off people for tonight’s performances. An old woman in pearls and heels teeters out of a taxi, her stooped-over companion in a tux holding onto her elbow. Watching them stumble off together, I feel something in my chest lurch. Look at the sunset, I tell myself. Look at something with beauty. But when I look back up at the sky, the streaks have darkened to the color of a bruise.

Prissy, temperamental asshole. That’s what the reporter was calling me. She was a piece of work, but on that particular point, she was speaking the truth.

My gaze returns to earth and when it does, it’s his eyes I see. Not the way I used to see them—around every corner, behind my own closed lids at the start of each day. Not in the way I used to imagine them in the eyes of every other guy I laid on top of. No, this time it really is his eyes. A photo of him, dressed in black, leaning against piano with one hip like a tired child. His hair is in one of those quiffs that seem to be a requisite for classical musicians. He used to wear it like that for recitals and chamber music concerts. There are no tendrils in this photo. I peer closer at the sign. YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS LOUIS TOMLINSON.

A few months ago, Liam broke the unspoken embargo on all things Louis and mailed me a clip from the magazine All About Us. I thought you should see this, was scrawled on a sticky note. It was an article titled “Twenty Under 20,” featuring upcoming “wunderkinds.” There was a page on Louis, including a picture I could barely bring myself to glance at, and an article about him, that after a few rounds of deep breathing, I only managed to skim. The piece called him the “heir apparent to Elton John .” In spite of myself, I’d smiled at that. Louis used to say that people who had no idea about the piano always described pianists as the next Elton John because he was their single point of reference. “What about The Piano Guys?” she’d always asked, referring to his own idol, a talented and tempestuous pianists who’d been covering multiple songs at the biggest worlds venues.

The All About Us article called Louis’ playing “otherworldly” and then very graphically described the car accident that had killed his parents and little sister more than three years ago. That had surprised me. Louis hadn’t been one to talk about that, to fish for sympathy points. But when I’d managed to make myself skim the piece again, I’d realized that it was a write-around, quotes taken from old newspaper accounts, but nothing directly from Louis himself.

I’d held onto the clipping for a few days, occasionally taking it out to glance over it. Having the thing in my wallet felt a little bit like carrying around a vial of plutonium. And for sure if Kendall caught me with an article about Louis there’d be explosions of the nuclear variety. So after a few more days, I threw it away and forced myself to forget it.

Now, I try to summon the details, to recall if it said anything about Louis leaving Oxford or playing recitals at Carnegie Hall.

I look up again. His eyes are still there, still staring at me. And I just know with as much certainty as I know anything in this world that he’s playing tonight. I know even before I consult the date on the poster and see that the performance is for August thirteenth.

And before I know what I’m doing, before I can argue myself out of it, rationalize what a terrible idea this is, I’m walking toward the box office. I don’t want to see him, I tell myself. I won’t see him. I only want to hear him. The box office sign says that tonight is sold out. I could announce who I am or put in a call to my hotel’s concierge or Paul and probably get a ticket, but instead I leave it to fate. I present myself as an anonymous, if underdressed, young man and ask if there are any seats left.

“In fact, we’re just releasing the rush tickets. I have a rear mezzanine, side. It’s not the ideal view, but it’s all that’s left,” the girl behind the glass window tells me.

“I’m not here for the view,” I reply.

“I always think that, too,” the girl says, laughing. “But people get particular about these kinds of things. That’ll be twenty-five dollars.”

I throw down my credit card and enter the cool, dim theater. I slide into my seat and close my eyes, remembering the last time I went to a piano concert somewhere this fancy. Five years ago, on our first date. Just as I did that night, I feel this mad rush of anticipation, even though I know that unlike that night, tonight I won’t kiss him. Or touch him. Or even see him up close.

Tonight, I’ll listen. And that’ll be enough.


	3. THREE

Louis woke up after four days, but we didn’t tell him until the sixth day. It didn’t matter because he seemed to already know. We sat around his hospital bed in the ICU, his taciturn grandfather having drawn the short straw, I guess, because he was the one chosen to break the news that his parents, Lauren and Brandon, had been killed instantly in the car crash that had landed him here. And that his little sister, Sarah, had died in the emergency room of the local hospital where she and Louis had been brought to before Louis was evacuated to Manchester. Nobody knew the cause of the crash. Did Louis have any memory of it?

Louis just lay there, blinking his eyes and holding onto my hand, digging his nails in so tightly it seemed like he’d never let me go. He shook his head and quietly said “no, no, no,” over and over again, but without tears, and I wasn’t sure if he was answering his grandfather’s question or just negating the whole situation. No!

But then the social worker stepped in, taking over in his no-nonsense way. She told Louis about the operations he’d undergone so far, “triage, really, just to get you stable, and you’re doing remarkably well,” and then talked about the surgeries that he’d likely be facing in the coming months: First a surgery to reset the bone in his left leg with metal rods. Then another surgery a week or so after that, to harvest skin from the thigh of his uninjured leg. Then another to graft that skin onto the messed-up leg. Those two procedures, unfortunately, would leave some “nasty scars.” But the injuries on his face, at least, could vanish completely with cosmetic surgery after a year. “Once you’re through your nonelective surgeries, provided there aren’t any complications—no infections from the splenectomy, no pneumonia, no problems with your lungs—we’ll get you out of the hospital and into rehab,” the social worker said. “Physical and occupational, speech and whatever else you need. We’ll assess where you are in a few days.” I was dizzy from this litany, but Louis seemed to hang on her every word, to pay more attention to the details of his surgeries than to the news of his family.

Later that afternoon, the social worker took the rest of us aside. We—Louis’ grandparents and me—had been worried about Louis’ reaction, or his lack of one. We’d expected screaming, hair pulling, something explosive, to match the horror of the news, to match our own grief. His eerie quiet had all of us thinking the same thing: brain damage.

“No, that’s not it,” the social worker quickly reassured. “The brain is a fragile instrument and we may not know for a few weeks what specific regions have been affected, but young people are so very resilient and right now his neurologists are quite optimistic. His motor control is generally good. His language faculties don’t seem too affected. He has weakness in his right side and his balance is off. If that’s the extent of his brain injury, then he is fortunate.”

We all cringed at that word. Fortunate. But the social worker looked at our faces. “Very fortunate because all of that is reversible. As for that reaction back there,” she said, gesturing toward the ICU, “that is a typical response to such extreme psychological trauma. The brain can only handle so much, so it filters in a bit at a time, digests slowly. He’ll take it all in, but he’ll need help.” Then she’d told us about the stages of grief, loaded us up with pamphlets on post-traumatic stress disorder, and recommended a grief counselor at the hospital for Louis to see. “It might not be a bad idea for the rest of you, too,” she’d said.

We’d ignored her. Louis’ grandparents weren’t the therapy types. And as for me, I had Louis’ rehabilitation to worry about, not my own.

The next round of surgeries started almost immediately, which I found cruel. Louis had just come back from the brink of it, only to be told his family was dead, and now he had to go under the knife again. Couldn’t they cut the boy a break? But the social worker had explained that the sooner Louis’ leg was fixed, the sooner Louis would be mobile, and the sooner he could really start to heal. So his femur was set with pins; skin grafts were taken. And with speed that made me breathless, he was discharged from the hospital and dispatched to a rehab center, which looked like a condo complex, with flat paths crisscrossing the grounds, which were just beginning to bloom with spring flowers when Louis arrived.

He’d been there less than a week, a determined, teeth-gritted terrifying week, when the envelope came.

Oxford. It had been so many things to me before. A foregone conclusion. A point of pride. A rival. And then I’d just forgotten about it. I think we all had. But life was churning outside Louis’ rehab center, and somewhere out there in the world, that other Louis—the one who had two parents, a brother, and a fully working body—still continued to exist. And in that other world, some judges had listened to Louis play a few months earlier and had gone on processing his application, and it had gone through the various motions until a final judgment was made, and that final judgment was before us now. Louis’ grandmother had been too nervous to open the envelope, so she waited for me and Louis’ grandfather before she sliced into it with a mother-of-pearl letter opener.

Louis got in. Had there ever been any question?

We all thought the acceptance would be good for him, a bright spot on an otherwise bleak horizon.

“And I’ve already spoken to the dean of admissions and explained your situation, and they’ve said you can put off starting for a year, two if you need,” Louis’ grandmother had said as she’d presented Louis with the news and the generous scholarship that had accompanied the acceptance. Oxford had actually suggested the deferral, wanting to make sure that Louis was able to play up to the school’s rigorous standards, if he chose to attend.

“No,” Louis had said from the center’s depressing common room in that dead-flat voice he had spoken in since the accident. None of us was quite sure whether this was from emotional trauma or if this was Louis’ affect now, his newly rearranged brain’s way of speaking. In spite of the social worker’s continued reassurances, in spite of his therapists’ evaluations that he was making solid progress, we still worried. We discussed these things in hushed tones after we left him alone on the nights that I couldn’t con myself into staying over.

“Well, don’t be hasty,” his grandmother had replied. “The world might look different in a year or two. You might still want to go.”

Louis’ grandmother had thought Louis was refusing Oxford. But I knew better. I knew Louis better. It was the deferral he was refusing.

His grandmother argued with Louis. September was five months away. Too soon. And she had a point. Louis’ leg was still in one of those boot casts, and he was just starting to walk again. He couldn’t open a jar because his right hand was so weak, and he would often blank on the names of simple things, like scissors. All of which the therapists said was to be expected and would likely pass—in good time. But five months? That wasn’t long.

Louis asked for his piano that afternoon. His grandmother had frowned, worried that this foolishness would waylay Louis’ recovery. But I jumped out of my chair and ran to my car and was back with the piano by the time the sun set.

After that, the piano became his therapy: physical, emotional, mental. The doctors were amazed at Louis’ upper-body strength—what his old music teacher Professor Marry had called him “piano body,” broad shoulders, muscular arms—and how his playing brought that strength back, which made the weakness in his right arm go away and strengthened his injured leg. It helped with the dizziness. Louis closed his eyes as he played, and he claimed that this, along with grounding him two feet on the floor, helped his balance. Through playing, Louis revealed the lapses he tried to hide in everyday conversation. If he wanted a Coke but couldn’t remember the word for it, he’d cover up and just ask for orange juice. But with piano, he would be honest about the fact that he remembered a Beethoven’s symphony he’d been working on a few months ago but not a simple étude he’d learned as a child; although once Professor Marry, who came down once a week to work with him, showed it to him, he’d pick it right up. This gave the speech therapists and neurologists clues as to the hopscotch way his brain had been impacted, and they tailored their therapies accordingly.

But mostly, the piano improved his mood. It gave him something to do every day. He stopped speaking in the monotone and started to talk like Louis again, at least when he was talking about music. His therapists altered his rehabilitation plan, allowing him to spend more time practicing. “We don’t really get how music heals the brain,” one of his neurologists told me one afternoon as he listened to him play to a group of patients in the common room, “but we know that it does. Just look at Louis.”

He left the rehab center after four weeks, two weeks ahead of schedule. He could walk with a cane, open a jar of peanut butter, and play the hell out of Beethoven.

That article, the “Twenty Under 20” thing from All About Us that Liam showed me, I do remember one thing about it. I remember the not-just-implied but overtly stated connection between Louis’ “tragedy” and his “otherworldly” playing. And I remember how that pissed me off. Because there was something insulting in that. As if the only way to explain his talent was to credit some supernatural force. Like what’d they think, that his dead family was inhabiting his body and playing a pianist choir through his fingers?

But the thing was, there was something otherworldly that happened. And I know because I was there. I witnessed it: I saw how Louis went from being a very talented player to something altogether different. In the space of five months, something magical and grotesque transformed him. So, yes, it was all related to his “tragedy,” but Louis was the one doing the heavy lifting. He always had been.

He left for Oxford the day after summer break. I drove him to the train station. He kissed me good-bye. He told me that he loved me more than life itself. Then he stepped into the train cabin.

He never came back.


	4. FOUR

But believe me

I’m not trying to deceive ya

I promise falling for me

Won’t be a mistake

 “ILLUSION”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 14

When the lights come up after the concert, I feel drained, lugubrious, as though my blood has been secreted out of me and replaced with tar. After the applause dies down, the people around me stand up, they talk about the concert, about the beauty of the Bach, the mournfulness of the Elgar, the risk—that paid off—of throwing in the contemporary John Cage piece. But it’s the Beethoven that’s eating up all the oxygen in the room, and I can understand why.

When Louis used to play his piano, his concentration was always written all over his body: a crease folded across his forehead. His lips, pursed so tightly they sometimes lost all their color, as if all his blood was requisitioned to his hands.

There was a little bit of that happening with the earlier pieces tonight. But when he got to the Beethoven, the final piece of his recital, something came over him. I don’t know if he hit his groove or if this was his signature piece, but instead of hunching over his piano, his body seemed to expand, to bloom, and the music filled the open spaces around it like a flowering vine. His strokes were broad and happy and bold, and the sound that filled the auditorium seemed to channel this pure emotion, like the very intention of the composer was spiraling through the room. And the look on his face, with his eyes upward, a small smile playing on his lips, I don’t know how to describe it without sounding like one of these clichéd magazine articles, but he seemed so at one with the music. Or maybe just happy. I guess I always knew he was capable of this level of artistry, but witnessing it fucking blew me away. Me and everyone else in that auditorium, judging by the thunderous applause he got.

The houselights are up now, bright and bouncing off the blond wood chairs and the geometric wall panels, making the floor start to swim. I sink back down into the nearest chair and try not to think about the Beethoven—or the other things: the way he wiped his hand on his trousers in between pieces, the way he cocked his head in time to some invisible orchestra, all gestures that are way too familiar to me.

Grasping onto the chair in front of me for balance, I stand up again. I make sure my legs are working and the ground isn’t spinning and then will one leg to follow the other toward the exit. I am shattered, exhausted. All I want to do now is go back to my hotel to down a couple of Ambien or Lunesta or Xanax or whatever’s in my medicine cabinet—and end this day. I want to go to sleep and wake up and have this all be over.

“Excuse me, Mr. Styles.”

I normally have a thing about enclosed spaces, but if there is one place in the city where I’d expect the safety of anonymity, it’s Carnegie Hall for a classical concert. All through the concert and intermission, no one gave me a second glance, except a pair of old biddies who I think were mostly just dismayed by my jeans. But this guy is about my age; he’s an usher, the only person within fifty feet under the age of thirty-five, the only person around here likely to own a White Eskimo album.

I’m reaching into my pocket for a pen that I don’t have. The usher looks embarrassed, shaking his head and his hands simultaneously. “No, no, Mr. Styles. I’m not asking for an autograph.” He lowers his voice. “It’s actually against the rules, could get me fired.”

“Oh,” I say, chastened, confused. For a second I wonder if I’m about to get dressed-down for dressing down.

The usher says: “Mr. Tomlinson would like you to come backstage.”

It’s noisy with the after-show hubbub, so for a second I assume I’ve misheard him. I think he says that he wants me backstage. But that can’t be right. He must be talking about the hall, not Louis Tomlinson.

But before I can get him to clarify, he’s leading me by the elbow back toward the staircase and down to the main lobby and through a small door beside the stage and through a maze of corridors, the walls lined with framed sheet music. And I’m allowing myself to be led; it’s like the time when I was ten years old and was sent to the principal’s office for throwing a water balloon in class, and all I could do was follow Mrs. Linden down the hallways and wonder what awaited me behind the main office doors. I have that same feeling. That I’m in trouble for something, that Paul didn’t really give me the evening off and I’m about to be reamed out for missing a photo shoot or pissing off a reporter or being the antisocial lone wolf in danger of breaking up the band.

And so I don’t really process it, don’t let myself hear it or believe it or think about it until the usher leads me to a small room and opens the door and closes it, and suddenly he’s there. Really there. A flesh-and-blood person, not a specter.

My first impulse is not to grab him or kiss him or yell at him. I simply want to touch his cheek, still flushed from the night’s performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet—not miles, not continents, not years—and to take a callused finger to his face. I want to touch him to make sure it’s really him, not one of those dreams I had so often after he left when I’d see him as clear as day, be ready to kiss him or take him to me only to wake up with Louis just beyond reach.

But I can’t touch him. This is a privilege that’s been revoked. Against my will, but still. Speaking of will, I have to mentally hold my arm in place, to keep the trembling from turning it into a jackhammer.

The floor is spinning, the vortex is calling, and I’m itching for one of my pills, but there’s no reaching for one now. I take some calming breaths to preempt a panic attack. I work my jaw in a vain attempt to get my mouth to say some words. I feel like I’m alone on a stage, no band, no equipment, no memory of any of our songs, being watched by a million people. I feel like an hour has gone by as I stand here in front of Louis Tomlinson, speechless as a newborn.

The first time we ever met in high school, I spoke first. I asked Louis what piano piece he’d just played. A simple question that started everything.

This time, it’s Louis who asks the question: “Is it really you?” And his voice, it’s exactly the same. I don’t know why I’d expect it to be different except that everything’s different now.

His voice jolts me back to reality. Back to the reality of the past three years. There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You’ve ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can’t say any of that.

I start to feel my heart pound and a ringing in my ears, and I’m about to lose it. But strangely, just when the panic starts to peak, some survival instinct kicks in, the one that allows me to step onto a stage in front of thousands of strangers. A calm steals over me as I retreat from myself, pushing me into the background and letting that other person take over. “In the flesh,” I respond in kind. Like it’s the most normal thing in the world for me to be at his concert and for him to have beckoned me into his sanctum. “Good concert,” I add because it seems like the thing to say. It also happens to be true.

“Thank you,” he says. Then he cringes. “I just, I can’t believe you’re here.”

I think of the three-year restraining order he basically took out on me, which I violated tonight. But you called me down, I want to say. “Yeah. I guess they’ll let any old riffraff in Carnegie Hall,” I joke. In my nervousness, though, the quip comes out surly.

He smooths his hands on the fabric of his jeans. He’s already changed out of his formal black suit into a black jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt. He shakes his head, tilts his face toward mine, all conspiratorial. “Not really. No punks allowed. Didn’t you see the warning on the marquee? I’m surprised you didn’t get arrested just for setting foot in the lobby.”

I know he’s trying to return my bad joke with one of his own and part of me is thankful for that, and thankful to see a glimmer of his old sense of humor. But another part, the churlish part, wants to remind him of all of the chamber music concerts, piano quartets, and recitals I once sat through. Because of him. With him. “How’d you know I was here?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? Harry Styles in Zankel Hall. At the intermission, the entire backstage crew was buzzing about it. Apparently, a lot of White Eskimo fans work at Carnegie Hall.”

“I thought I was being incognito,” I say. To his feet. The only way to survive this conversation is to have it with Louis toms. He has a little smiley faces drawn on them.

“You? Impossible,” he replies. “So, how are you?”

How am I? Are you for real? I force my eyes upward and look at Louis for the first time. He’s still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Kendall Jenner kind of way. In a quiet way that’s always been devastating to me. His hair, messy and dark, is styled now in one of those quiffs he used to make. His t-shirts neckline seems too big and has slid a little off and is showing a bit of his shoulders, which are still caramel brown and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on his left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red welt, is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.

Louis’ eyes reach out to meet mine, and for a second I fear that my facade will fall apart. I look away.

“Oh, you know? Good. Busy,” I answer.

“Right. Of course. Busy. Are you on tour?”

“Yep. Off to London tomorrow.”

“Oh. I’m off to Japan tomorrow.”

Opposite directions, I think and am surprised when Louis actually says it out loud. “Opposite directions.” The words just hang out there, ominous. Suddenly, I feel the vortex begin to churn again. It’s going to swallow us both if I don’t get away. “Well, I should probably go.” I hear the calm person impersonating Harry Styles say from what sounds like several feet away.

I think I see something darken his expression, but I can’t really tell because every part of my body is undulating, and I swear I might just come inside-out right here. But as I’m losing it, that other Harry is still functioning. He’s reaching out his hand toward Louis even though the thought of me giving Louis Tomlinson a business handshake is maybe one of the saddest things I’ve ever imagined.

Louis looks down at my outstretched hand, opens his mouth to say something, and then just sighs. His face hardens into a mask as he reaches out his own hand to take mine.

The tremor in my hand has become so normal, so nonstop, that it’s generally imperceptible to me. But as soon as my fingers close around Louis’, the thing I notice is that it stops and suddenly it goes quiet, like when the squall of feedback is suddenly cut when someone switches off an amp. And I could linger here forever.

Except this is a handshake, nothing more. And in a few seconds my hand is at my side and it’s like I’ve transferred a little of my crazy to Louis because it looks like his own hand is trembling. But I can’t be sure because I’m drifting away on a fast current.

And the next thing I know, I hear the door to his dressing room click behind me, leaving me out here on the rapids and Louis back there on the shore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiii once again! what do you think of the sequel so far? Like it? Hate it? let me know ;)


	5. FIVE

I know it’s really cheesy—crass even—to compare my being dumped to the accident that killed Louis’ family, but I can’t help it. Because for me, at any rate, the aftermath felt exactly the same. For the first few weeks, I’d wake up in a fog of disbelief. That didn’t really happen, did it? Oh, fuck, it did. Then I’d be doubled over. Fist to the gut. It took a few weeks for it all to sink in. But unlike with the accident—when I had to be there, be present, help, be the person to lean on—after he left, I was all alone. There was nobody to step up to the plate for. So I just let everything fall away and then everything just stopped.

I moved home, back to my parents’ place. Just grabbed a pile of stuff from my room at the House of Rock and left. Left everything. School. The band. My life. A sudden and wordless departure. I balled up in my boy bed. I was worried that everyone would bang down the door and force me to explain myself. But that’s the thing with death. The whisper of its descent travels fast and wide, and people must’ve known I’d become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body. Well, except relentless Liam, who stopped by once a week to drop off a CD mix of whatever new music he was loving, which he cheerfully stacked on top of the untouched CD he’d left the week before.

My parents seemed baffled by my return. But then, bafflement was pretty typical where I was concerned. My dad had been a logger, and then when that industry went belly-up he’d gotten a job on the line at an electronics plant. My mom worked for the university catering department. They were one another’s second marriages, their first marital forays both disastrous and childless and never discussed; I only found out about them from an aunt and uncle when I was ten. They had me when they were older, and I’d apparently come as a surprise. And my mom liked to say that everything that I’d done—from my mere existence to becoming a musician, to falling in love with a boy like Louis, to going to college, to having the band become so popular, to dropping out of college, to dropping out of the band—was a surprise, too. They accepted my return home with no questions. Mom brought me little trays of food and tea to my room, like I was a prisoner.

For three months, I lay in my childhood bed, wishing myself as comatose as Louis had been. That had to be easier than this. My sense of shame finally roused me. I was nineteen years old, a college dropout, living in my parents’ house, unemployed, a layabout, a cliché. My parents had been cool about the whole thing, but the reek of my pathetic was starting to make me sick. Finally, right after the New Year, I asked my father if there were any jobs at the plant.

“You sure this is what you want?” he’d asked me. It wasn’t what I wanted. But I couldn’t have what I wanted. I’d just shrugged. I’d heard him and my mom arguing about it, her trying to get him to talk me out of it. “Don’t you want more than that for him?” I heard her shout-whisper from downstairs. “Don’t you want him back in school at the very least?”

“It’s not about what I want,” he’d answered.

So he asked around human resources, got me an interview, and a week later, I began work in the data entry department. From six thirty in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon, I would sit in a windowless room, plugging in numbers that had no meaning to me.

On my first day of work, my mother got up early to make me a huge breakfast I couldn’t eat and a pot of tea that wasn’t nearly strong enough. She stood over me in her ratty pink bathrobe, a worried expression on her face. When I got up to leave, she shook her head at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You working at the plant,” she said, staring at me solemnly. “This doesn’t surprise me. This is what I would’ve expected from a son of mine.” I couldn’t tell if the bitterness in her voice was meant for her or me.

The job sucked, but whatever. It was brainless. I came home and slept all afternoon and then woke up and read and dozed from ten o’clock at night until five in the morning, when it was time to get up for work. The schedule was out of sync with the living world, which was fine by me

A few weeks earlier, around Christmas, I’d still held a candle of hope. Christmas was when Louis had initially planned to come home. The ticket he’d bought for Oxford was a round-trip, and the return date was December nineteenth. Though I knew it was foolish, I somehow thought he’d come see me, he’d offer some explanation—or, better yet, a massive apology. Or we’d find that this had all been some huge and horrible misunderstanding. He’d been emailing me daily but they hadn’t gotten through, and he’d show up at my door, livid about my not having returned his emails, the way he used to get pissed off at me for silly things, like how nice I was, or was not, to hisfriends.

But December came and went, a monotony of gray, of muted Christmas carols coming from downstairs. I stayed in bed.

It wasn’t until February that I got a visitor home from a back East college.

“Harry, Harry, you have a guest,” my mom said, gently rapping at my door. It was around dinnertime and I was sacked out, the middle of the night to me. In my haze, I thought it was Louis. I bolted upright but saw from my mother’s pained expression that she knew she was delivering disappointing news. “It’s Hannah!” she said with forced joviality.

Hannah? I hadn’t heard from Louis’ best friend since August, not since she’d taken off for school in London. And all at once, it hit me that her silence was as much a betrayal as Louis’. Hannah and I had never been buddies when Louis and I were together. At least not before the accident. But after, we’d been soldered somehow. I hadn’t realized that Louis and Hannah were a package deal, one with the other. Lose one, lose the other. But then, how else would it be?

But now, here was Hannah. Had Louis sent her as some sort of an emissary? Hannah was smiling awkwardly, hugging herself against the damp night. “Hey,” she said. “You’re hard to find.”

“I’m where I’ve always been,” I said, kicking off the covers. Hannah, seeing my boxers, turned away until I’d pulled on a pair of jeans. I reached for a pack of cigarettes. I’d started smoking a few weeks before. Everyone at the plant seemed to. It was the only reason to take a break. Hannah’s eyes widened in surprise, like I’d just pulled out a Glock. I put the cigarettes back down without lighting up.

“I thought you’d be at the House of Rock, so I went there. I saw Liam and Sophia. They fed me dinner. It was nice to see them.” She stopped and appraised my room. The rumpled, sour blankets, the closed shades. “Did I wake you?”

“I’m on a weird schedule.”

“Yeah. Your mom told me. Data entry?” She didn’t bother to try to mask her surprise.

I was in no mood for small talk or condescension. “So, what’s up, Hannah?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. I’m in town for break. We all went to Glasgow to see my grandparents for Hanukkah, so this is the first time I’ve been back and I wanted to stop and say hi.”

Hannah looked nervous. But she also looked concerned. It was an expression I recognized well. The one that said I was the patient now. In the distant night I heard a siren. Reflexively, I scratched my head.

“Do you still see him?” I asked.

“What?” Hannah’s voice chirped in surprise.

I stared at her. And slowly repeated the question. “Do you still see Louis?”

“Y—Yes,” Hannah stumbled. “I mean, not a lot. We’re both busy with school, and Oxford and London are two hours apart. But yes. Of course.”

Of course. It was the certainty that did it. That made something murderous rise up in me. I was glad there was nothing heavy within reaching distance.

“Does he know you’re here?”

“No. I came as your friend.”

“As my friend?”

Hannah blanched from the sarcasm in my voice, but that girl was always tougher than she seemed. She didn’t back down or leave. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Tell me, then, friend. Did Louis, your friend, your BFF, did he tell you why he dumped me? Without a word? Did he happen to mention that to you at all? Or didn’t I come up?”

“Harry, please . . .” Hannah’s voice was an entreaty.

“No, please, Hannah. Please, because I haven’t got a clue.”

Hannah took a deep breath and then straightened her posture. I could practically see the resolve stiffening up her spine, vertebra by vertebra, the lines of loyalty being drawn. “I didn’t come here to talk about Louis. I came here to see you, and I don’t think I should discuss Louis with you or vice versa.”

She’d adopted the tone of a social worker, an impartial third party, and I wanted to smack her for it. For all of it. Instead, I just exploded. “Then what the fuck are you doing here? What good are you then? Who are you to me? Without him, who are you? You’re nothing! A nobody!”

Hannah stumbled back, but when she looked up, instead of looking angry, she looked at me full of tenderness. It made me want to throttle her even more. “Harry—” she began.

“Get the hell out of here,” I growled. “I don’t want to see you again!”

The thing with Hannah was, you didn’t have to tell her twice. She left without another word.

That night, instead of sleeping, instead of reading, I paced my room for four hours. As I walked back and forth, pushing permanent indentations into the tread of my parents’ cheap shag carpeting, I felt something febrile growing inside of me. It felt alive and inevitable, the way a puke with a nasty hangover sometimes is. I felt it itching its way through my body, begging for release, until it finally came tearing out of me with such force that first I punched my wall, and then, when that didn’t hurt enough, my window. The shards of glass sliced into my knuckles with a satisfying ache followed by the cold blast of a February night. The shock seemed to wake something slumbering deep within me.

Because that was the night I picked up my guitar for the first time in a year.

And that was the night I started writing songs again.

Within two weeks, I’d written more than ten new songs. Within a month, White Eskimo was back together and playing them. Within two months, we’d signed with a major label. Within four months, we were recording Stockholm Syndrome, comprised of fifteen of the songs I’d written from the chasm of my childhood bedroom. Within a year, Stockholm Syndrome was on the Billboard charts and White Eskimo was on the cover of national magazines.

It’s occurred to me since that I owe Hannah either an apology or a thank-you. Maybe both. But by the time I came to this realization, it seemed like things were too far gone to do anything about it. And, the truth is, I still don’t know what I’d say to her.


	6. SIX

We’re only getting older baby and I’ve been thinking about it lately

Does it ever drive you crazy just how fast the night changes?

Everything that you’ve ever dreamed of

Disappearing when you wake up

But there’s nothing to be afraid of even when the night changes

It will never change me and you

“NIGHT CHANGES”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 7

When I get onto the street, my hands are quaking and my insides feel like they’re staging a coup. I reach for my pills, but the bottle is empty. Fuck! Paul must’ve fed me the last one in the cab. Do I have more at the hotel? I’ve got to get some before tomorrow’s flight. I grab for my phone and remember that I left it back at the hotel in some boneheaded attempt to disconnect.

People are swarming around and their gazes are lingering a little too long on me. I can’t deal with being recognized right now. I can’t deal with anything. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.

I just want out. Out of my existence. I find myself wishing that a lot lately. Not be dead. Or kill myself. Or any of that kind of stupid shit. It’s more that I can’t help thinking that if I’d never been born in the first place, I wouldn’t be facing those sixty-seven nights, I wouldn’t be right here, right now, having just endured that conversation with him. It’s your own fault for coming tonight, I tell myself. You should’ve left well enough alone.

I light a cigarette and hope that will steady me enough to walk back to the hotel where I’ll call Paul and get everything straightened out and maybe even sleep a few hours and get this disastrous day behind me once and for all.

“You should quit.”

His voice jars me. But it also somehow calms me. I look up. There’s Louis, face flushed, but also, oddly, smiling. He’s breathing hard, like he’s been running. Maybe he gets chased by fans, too. I imagine that old couple in the tux and pearls tottering after him.

I don’t even have time to feel embarrassed because Louis is here again, standing in front of me like when we still shared the same space and time and bumping into each other, though always a happy coincidence, was nothing unusual, not the slightest bit extraordinary. For a second I think of that line in Casablanca when Bogart says: Of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine. But then I remind myself that I walked into his gin joint.

Louis covers the final few feet between us slowly, like I’m a cagey cat that needs to be brought in. He eyes the cigarette in my hand. “Since when do you smoke?” he asks. And it’s like the years between us are gone, and Louis has forgotten that he no longer has the right to get on my case.

Even if in this instance it’s deserved. Once upon a time, I’d been adamantly straightedge where nicotine was concerned. “I know. It’s a cliché,” I admit.

He eyes me, the cigarette. “Can I have one?”

“You?” When Louis was like six or something, he’d read some kid’s book about a boy who got his dad to quit smoking and then he’d decided to lobby his mom, an on-again-off-again-smoker, to quit. It had taken Louis months to prevail upon Lauren, but prevail he did. By the time I met them, Lauren didn’t smoke at all. Louis’ dad, Brandon, puffed on a pipe, but that seemed mostly for show. “You smoke now?” I ask him.

 “No,” Louis replies. “But I just had a really intense experience and I’m told cigarettes calm your nerves.”

The intensity of a concert—it sometimes left me pent up and edgy. “I feel that way after shows sometimes,” I say, nodding.

I shake out a cigarette for him; his hand is still trembling, so I keep missing the tip of the cigarette with my lighter. For a second I imagine grabbing his wrist to hold him steady. But I don’t. I just chase the cigarette until the flame flashes across his eyes and lights the tip. He inhales and exhales, coughs a little. “I’m not talking about the concert, Harry,” he says before taking another labored drag. “I’m talking about you.”

Little pinpricks fire-cracker up and down my body. Just calm down, I tell myself. You just make him nervous, showing up all out of the blue like that. Still, I’m flattered that I matter—even if it’s just enough to scare him.

We smoke in silence for a while. And then I hear something gurgle. Louis shakes his head in dismay and looks down at his stomach. “Remember how I used to get before concerts?”

Back in the day, Louis would get too nervous to eat before shows, so afterward he was usually ravenous. Back then, we’d go eat Mexican food at our favorite joint or hit a diner out on the highway for French fries with gravy and pie—Louis’ dream meal. “How long since your last meal?” I ask.

Louis peers at me again and stubs out his half-smoked cigarette. He shakes his head. “Zankel Hall? I haven’t eaten for days. My stomach was rumbling all through the performance. I was sure even people in the balcony seats could hear it.”

“Nope. Just the piano.”

“That’s a relief. I think.”

We stand there in silence for a second. His stomach gurgles again. “Fries and pie still the optimal meal?” I ask. I picture him in a booth back in our place in Doncaster, waving his fork around, as he critiqued his own performance.

“Not pie. Not in New York. The diner pies are such disappointments. The fruit’s almost always canned. And marionberry does not exist here. How is it possible that a fruit simply ceases to exist from one coast to another?”

How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another? “Couldn’t tell you.”

“But the French fries are good.” He gives me a hopeful half smile.

“I like French fries,” I say. I like French fries? I sound like a slow child in a made-for-TV movie.

His eyes flutter up to meet mine. “Are you hungry?” he asks.

Am I ever.

I follow him across Fifty-seventh Street and then down Ninth Avenue. He walks quickly—without even a faint hint of the limp he had when he left—and purposefully, like New Yorkers do, pointing out landmarks here and there like a professional tour guide. It occurs to me I don’t even know if he still lives in Oxford or have moved here or if tonight was just a tour date.

You could just ask him, I tell myself. It’s a normal enough question.

Yeah, but it’s so normal that it’s weird that I have to ask.

Well you’ve got to say something to him.

But just as I’m getting up the nerve, Beethoven’s Ninth starts chiming from his bag. Louis stops his NYC monologue, reaches in for his cell phone, looks at the screen, and winces.

“Bad news?”

He shakes his head and gives a look so pained it has to be practiced. “No. But I have to take this.”

He flips open the phone. “Hello. I know. Please calm down. I know. Look, can you just hold on one second?” He turns to me, his voice all smooth and professional now. “I know this is unbearably rude, but can you just give me five minutes?”

I get it. He just played a big show. He’s got people calling. But even so, and in spite of the mask of apology he’s wearing, I feel like a groupie being asked to wait in the back of the bus until the rock star’s ready. But like the groupies always do, I acquiesce. The rock star is Louis. What else am I gonna do?

“Thank you,” he says.

I let Louis walk a few paces ahead of me, to give him some privacy, but I still catch snippets of his end of the conversation. I know it was important to you. To us. I promise I’ll make it up to everyone. He doesn’t mention me once. In fact he seems to have forgotten about me back here entirely.

Which would be okay except that he’s also oblivious to the commotion that my presence is creating along Ninth Avenue, which is full of bars and people loitering and smoking in front of them. People who double take as they recognize me, and yank out their cell phones and digital cameras to snap pictures.

I vaguely wonder if any of the shots will make it onto Gabber or one of the tabloids. It would be a dream for Vanessa LeGrande. And a nightmare with Kendall. Kendall is jealous enough of Louis as it is, even though he’s never met him; she only knows about him. Even though she knows I haven’t seen Louis in years, Kendall still complains: “It’s hard competing with a ghost.” As if Kendall Jenner has to compete with anyone.

“Harry? Harry Styles?” It’s a real paparazzo with a telephoto lens about a half block away. “Yo, Harry. Can we get a shot? Just one shot,” he calls.

Sometimes that works. Give them one minute of your face and they leave. But more often than not, it’s like killing one bee and inviting the swarm’s wrath.

“Yo, Harry. Where’s Kendall?”

I put on my glasses, speed up, though it’s too late for that. I stop walking and step out on to Ninth Avenue, which is clogged with taxis. Louis just keeps walking down the block, yapping away into his cell phone. The old Louis hated cell phones, hated people who talked on them in public, who dismissed one person’s company to take a phone call from someone else. The old Louis would never have uttered the phrase unbearably rude.

I wonder if I should let him keep going. The thought of just jumping into a cab and being back at my hotel by the time he figures out I’m not behind him anymore gives me a certain gritty satisfaction. Let him do the wondering for a change.

But the cabs are all occupied, and, as if the scent of my distress has suddenly reached him, Louis swivels back around to see me, to see the photographer approaching me, brandishing his cameras like machetes. He looks back on to Ninth Avenue at the sea of cars. Just go on, go on ahead, I silently tell him. Get your picture taken with me and your life becomes fodder for the mill. Just keep moving.

But Louis’ striding toward me, grabbing me by the wrist and, even though he’s a foot shorter and sixty pounds lighter than me, I suddenly feel safe, safer in his custody than I do in any bouncer’s. He walks right into the crowded avenue, stopping traffic just by holding up his other hand. A path opens for us, like we’re the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. As soon as we’re on the opposite curb, that opening disappears as the cabs all roar toward a green light, leaving my paparazzo stalker on the other side of the street. “It’s near impossible to get a cab now,” Louis tells me. “All the Broadway shows just let out.”

“I’ve got about two minutes on that guy. Even if I get into a cab, he’s gonna follow on foot in this traffic.”

“Don’t worry. He can’t follow where we’re going.”

He jogs through the crowds, down the avenue, simultaneously pushing me ahead of him and shielding me like a defensive linebacker. He turns off on to a dark street full of tenement buildings. About halfway down the block, the cityscape of brick apartments abruptly gives way to a low area full of trees that’s surrounded by a tall iron fence with a heavy-duty lock for which Louis magically produces the key. With a clank, the lock pops open. “In you go,” he tells me, pointing to a hedge and a gazebo behind it. “Duck in the gazebo. I’ll lock up.”

I do as he says and a minute later he’s back at my side. It’s dark in here, the only light the soft glow of a nearby street lamp. Louis puts a finger to his lips and motions for me to crouch down.

“Where the hell did he go?” I hear someone call from the street.

“He went this way,” says a woman, her voice thick with a New York accent. “I swear to ya.”

“Well then, where is he?”

“What about that park?” the woman asks.

The clatter of the gate echoes through the garden. “It’s locked,” he says. In the darkness, I see Louis grin.

“Maybe he jumped over.”

“It’s like ten feet high,” the guy replies. “You don’t just leap over something like that.”

“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” the woman replies. “Ya could go inside and check for him.”

“And rip my new Armani pants on the fence? A man has his limits. And it looks empty in there. He probably caught a cab. Which we should do. I got sources texting that Timberlake’s at the Breslin.”

I hear the sound of footsteps retreating and stay quiet for a while longer just to be safe. Louis breaks the silence.

“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” he asks in a pitch-perfect imitation. Then he starts to laugh.

“I’m not gonna rip my new Armani pants,” I reply. “A man has his limits.”

Louis laughs even harder. The tension in my gut eases. I almost smile.

After his laughter dies down, he stands up, wipes the dirt from his backside, and sits down on the bench in the gazebo. I do the same. “That must happen to you all the time.”

I shrug. “It’s worse in New York and L.A. And London. But it’s everywhere now. Even fans sell their pics to the tabloids.”

“Everyone’s in on the game, huh?” he says. Now this sounds more like the Louis I once knew, not like a Classical Pianist with a lofty vocabulary and one of those pan-Euro accents like Madonna’s.

“Everyone wants their cut,” I say. “You get used to it.”

“You get used to a lot of things,” Louis acknowledges.

I nod in the darkness. My eyes have adjusted so I can see that the garden is pretty big, an expanse of grass bisected by brick paths and ringed by flower beds. Every now and then, a tiny light flashes in the air. “Are those fireflies?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“In the middle of the city?”

“Right. It used to amaze me, too. But if there’s a patch of green, those little guys will find it and light it up. They only come for a few weeks a year. I always wonder where they go the rest of the time.”

I ponder that. “Maybe they’re still here, but just don’t have anything to light up about.”

“Could be. The insect version of seasonal affective disorder, though the buggers should try living in Doncaster if they really want to know what a depressing winter is like.”

“How’d you get the key to this place?” I ask. “Do you have to live around here?”

Louis shakes his head, then nods. “Yes, you do have to live in the area to get a key, but I don’t. The key belongs to Ernesto Castorel. Or did belong to. When he was a guest conductor at the Philharmonic, he lived nearby and the garden key came with his sublet. I was having roommate issues at the time, which is a repeating theme in my life, so I wound up crashing at his place a lot, and after he left, I ‘accidentally’ took the key.”

I don’t know why I should feel so sucker-punched. You’ve been with so many guys since Louis you’ve lost count, I reason with myself. It’s not like you’ve been languishing in celibacy. You think he has?

“Have you ever seen him conduct?” he asks me. “He always reminded me of you.”

Except for tonight, I haven’t so much as listened to classical music since you left. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Castorel? Oh, he’s incredible. He came from the slums of Venezuela, and through this program that helps street kids by teaching them to play musical instruments, he wound up becoming a conductor at sixteen. He was the conductor of the Prague Philharmonic at twenty-four, and now he’s the artistic director for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and runs that very same program in Venezuela that gave him his start. He sort of breathes music. Same as you.”

Who says I breathe music? Who says I even breathe? “Wow,” I say, trying to push back against the jealousy I have no right to.

Louis looks up, suddenly embarrassed. “Sorry. I forget sometimes that the entire world isn’t up on the minutiae of classical music. He’s pretty famous in our world.”

Yeah, well my supposed girlfriend is really famous in the rest of the world, I think. But does he even know about Kendall and me? You’d have to have your head buried beneath a mountain not to have heard about us. Or you’d have to intentionally be avoiding any news of me. Or maybe you’d just have to be a classical pianist who doesn’t read tabloids. “He sounds swell,” I say.

Even Louis doesn’t miss the sarcasm. “Not famous, like you, I mean,” he says, his gushiness petering into awkwardness.

I don’t answer. For a few seconds there’s no sound, save for the river of traffic on the street. And then Louis’ stomach gurgles again, reminding us that we’ve been waylaid in this garden. That we’re actually on our way someplace else.


	7. SEVEN

In a weird twisted way, Kendall and I met because of Louis. Well, one degree of separation, I guess. It was really because of the singer-songwriter Matthew Healy. White Eskimo had been slated to open for Matthew’s former band, 1975, the day of Louis’ accident. When I hadn’t been allowed to visit Louis in the ICU, Matthew had come to the hospital to try to create a diversion. He hadn’t been successful. And that had been the last I’d seen of Matthew until the crazy time after Stockholm Syndrome went double platinum.

White Eskimo was in L.A. for the MTV Movie Awards. One of our previously recorded but never released songs had been put on the sound track for the movie Hello, Killer and was nominated for Best Song. We didn’t win.

It didn’t matter. The MTV Awards were just the latest in a string of ceremonies, and it had been a bumper crop in terms of awards. Just a few months earlier we’d picked up our Grammys for Best New Artist and Song of the Year for “18.”

It was weird. You’d think that a platinum record, a pair of Grammys, a couple of VMAs would make your world, but the more it all piled on, the more the scene was making my skin crawl. There were the girls, the drugs, the ass-kissing, plus the hype—the constant hype. People I didn’t know—and not groupies, but industry people—rushing up to me like they were my longtime friends, kissing me on both cheeks, calling me “babe,” slipping business cards into my hand, whispering about movie roles or ads for Japanese beer, one-day shoots that would pay a million bucks.

I couldn’t handle it, which was why once we’d finished doing our bit for the Movie Awards, I’d ducked out of the Gibson Amphitheater to the smokers’ area. I was planning my escape when I saw Matthew Healy striding toward me. Behind him was a pretty, vaguely familiar looking girl with long black hair and dark eyes the size of dinner plates.

“Harry Styles as I live and breathe,” Matthew said, embracing me in a dervish hug. Matthew had recently gone solo and his debut album, Kiss This, had been racking up awards, too, so we’d been bumping into each other a lot at the various ceremonies. “Harry, this is Kendall Jenner, but you probably know her as the one nominated for The Choice Model Award. Did you know her whole family has a TV reality show as well?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

“I lost to one of my friends - Cara. I guess that’s what always happens in this industry,” Kendall deadpanned.

“You were robbed!” Matthew interjected. “Both of you. It’s a cryin’ shame. But I’ll leave you to lick your wounds or just get acquainted. I’ve got to get back and present. Harry, see you around, I hope. You should come to L.A. more often. You could use some color.” He sauntered off, winking at Kendall.

We stood there in silence for a second. I offered a cigarette to Kendall. She shook her head, then looked at me with those eyes of hers, so unnervingly dark. “That was a setup, in case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I was, sort of.”

She shrugged, not in the least embarrassed. “I told Matthew I thought you were intriguing, so he took matters into his own hands. He and I, we’re alike that way.”

“I see.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?”

“It would bother a lot of guys out here. Actors tend to be really insecure. Or gay.”

“I am… I’m not from here.”

She smiled at that. Then she looked at my jacket. “You going AWOL or something?”

“You think they’ll send the dogs on me?”

“Maybe, but it’s L.A., so they’ll be teeny-tiny Chihuahuas all trussed up in designer bags, so how much damage can they do. You want company?”

“Really? You don’t have to stay and mourn your best-model loss?”

She looked me squarely in the eye, like she got the joke I was making and was in on it, too. Which I appreciated. “I prefer to celebrate or commiserate my modeling in private.”

The only plan I had was to return to my hotel in the limo we had waiting. So instead I went with Kendall. She gave her driver the night off and grabbed the keys to her hulking SUV and drove us down the hill from Universal City toward the coast.

We cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway to a beach north of the city called Point Dume. We stopped on the way for a bottle of wine and some takeout sushi. By the time we reached the beach, a fog had descended over the inky water.

“June gloom,” Kendall said, shivering in her short little green-and-black off-the-shoulder dress. “Never fails to freeze me.”

“Don’t you have a sweater or something?” I asked.

“It didn’t complete the look.”

“Here.” I handed her my jacket.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “A gentleman.”

We sat on the beach, sharing the wine straight out of the bottle. She told me about the book she’d recently wrote and the one she was leaving to start shooting the following month. And she was trying to decide between one of two photoshoots for the company she was starting.

“So you’re a fundamentally lazy person?” I asked.

She laughed. “I grew up in this armpit town in Arizona, where all my life my mom told me how pretty I was, how I should be a model, an actress. She never even let me play outside in the sun—in Arizona!—because she didn’t want me to mess up my skin. It was like all I had going for me was a pretty face.” She turned to stare at me, and I could see the intelligence in her eyes, which were set, admittedly, in a very pretty face. “But fine, whatever, my face was the ticket out of there. But now Hollywood’s the same way. Everyone has me pegged as an ingenue, another pretty face. But I know better. So if I want to prove I have a brain, if I want to play in the sunshine, so to speak, it’s up to me to find the project that breaks me out. I feel like I’ll be better positioned to do that if I’m a producer, too. It’s all about control, really. I want to control everything, I guess.”

“Yeah, but some things you can’t control, no matter how hard you try.”

Kendall stared out at the dark horizon, dug her bare toes into the cool sand. “I know,” she said quietly. She turned to me. “I’m really sorry about your boyfriend. Louis, right?”

I coughed on the wine. That wasn’t a name I was expecting to hear right now.

“I’m sorry. It’s just when I asked Matthew about you, he told me how you two met. He wasn’t gossiping or anything. But he was there, at the hospital, so he knew.”

My heart thundered in my chest. I just nodded.

“My dad left when I was seven. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Kendall continued. “So I can’t imagine losing someone like that.”

I nodded again, swigged at the wine. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

She nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “But at least they all died together. I mean that’s got to be a blessing in a way. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up if the rest of my family had died.”

The wine came sputtering out of my mouth, through my nose. It took me a few moments to regain my breath and my power of speech. When I did, I told Kendall that Louis wasn’t dead. He’d survived the crash, had made a full recovery.

Kendall looked genuinely horrified, so much so that I felt sorry for her instead of for myself. “Lord, Harry. I’m so mortified. I just sort of assumed. Matthew said he’d never heard boo about Louis again and I would’ve come to the same conclusion. White Eskimo kind of disappears and then Stockholm Syndrome, I mean, the lyrics are just so full of pain and anger and betrayal at being left behind. . . .”

“Yep,” I said.

Then Kendall looked at me, the brown of her eyes reflecting in the moonlight. And I could tell that she understood it all, without my having to say a word. Not having to explain, that felt like the biggest relief. “Oh, Harry. That’s even worse in a way, isn’t it?”

When Kendall said that, uttered out loud the thing that to my never-ending shame I sometimes felt, I’d fallen in love with her a little bit. Evan though I never thought I would. And I’d thought that was enough. That this implicit understanding and those first stirrings would bloom until my feelings for Kendall were as consuming as my love for Louis had once been.

I went back to Kendall’s house that night. And all that spring I visited her on set up in Vancouver, then in Chicago, then in Budapest. Anything to get out of Doncaster, away from the awkwardness that had formed like a thick pane of aquarium glass between me and the rest of the band. When she returned to L.A. that summer, she suggested I move into her Hollywood Hills house. “There’s a guesthouse out back that I never use that we could turn into your studio.”

The idea of getting out of Doncaster, away from the rest of the band, from all that history, a fresh start, a house full of windows and light, a future with Kendall—it had felt so right at the time.

So that’s how I became one half of a celebrity couple. Now I get my picture snapped with Kendall as we do stuff as mundane as grab a coffee from Starbucks or take a walk through Runyon Canyon.

I should be happy. I should be grateful. But the problem is, I never can get away from feeling that my fame isn’t about me; it’s about them. Stockholm Syndrome was written with Louis’ blood on my hands, and that was the record that launched me. And when I became really famous, it was for being with Kendall, so it had less to do with the music I was making than the girl I was with.

And the girl. She’s great. Any guy would kill to be with her.

Except even at the start, when we were in that can’t-get-enough-of-you phase, there was like some invisible wall between us and that wall was my sexuality. At first I tried to take it down, tried to explain myself that I can be with girl, love a girl, but it took so much effort to even make cracks and believe it myself. And then I got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how sexuality were, you can’t change the way you are overnight or just because you want to move on. You realise you were born to be different and that’s how trying to deny your sexuality to love someone else felt once you had a few battle scars.

Maybe that’s why I can’t let myself enjoy what we have. Why, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I go outside to listen to the lapping of the pool filter and obsess about the shit about Kendall that drives me crazy. Even as I’m doing it, I’m aware that it’s minor league—the way she sleeps with a BlackBerry next to her pillow, the way she works out hours a day and catalogs every little thing she eats, the way she refuses to deviate from a plan or a schedule. And I know that there’s plenty of great stuff to balance out the bad. She’s generous as an oil baron and loyal as a pit bull.

I know I’m not easy to live with. Kendall tells me I’m withdrawn, evasive, cold. She accuses me—depending on her mood—of being jealous of her career, of being with her by accident, of cheating on her. It’s not true. I haven’t touched a groupie since we’ve been together; I haven’t wanted to.

I always tell her that part of the problem is that we’re hardly ever in the same place. If I’m not recording or touring, then Kendall’s on location or off on one of her endless modeling junkets. What I don’t tell her is that I can’t imagine us being together more of the time. Because it’s not like when we’re in the same room everything’s so great.

Sometimes, after Kendall’s had a couple of glasses of wine, she’ll claim that Louis’ what’s between us. “Why don’t you just go back to your ghost?” she’ll say. “I’m tired of competing with him.”

“Nobody can compete with you,” I tell her, kissing her on the forehead. And I’m not lying. Nobody can compete with Kendall. And then I tell her it’s not Louis; it’s not any one. Kendall and I live in a bubble, a spotlight, a pressure cooker. It would be hard on any couple.

But I think we both know I’m lying. And the truth is, there isn’t any avoiding Louis’ ghost. Kendall and I wouldn’t even be together if it weren’t for him. In that twisted, incestuous way of fate, Louis’ a part of our history, and we’re among the shards of his legacy.


	8. EIGHT

Somehow it feels like nothing has changed

Right now my heart is beating the same

Out loud someone’s calling my name

 

It sounds like you

 “ONCE IN A LIFETIME”

STOCKHOML SYNDROME, TRACK 15

Ever hear the one about that dog that spent its life chasing cars and finally caught one—and had no idea what to do with it?

I’m that dog.

Because here I am, alone with Louis Tomlinson, something I’ve fantasized about now for more than three years, and it’s like, now what?

We’re at the diner that was apparently his destination, some random place way over on the west side of town. “It has a parking lot,” Louis tells me when we arrive.

“Uh-huh,” is all I can think to answer.

“I’d never seen a Manhattan restaurant with a parking lot before, which is why I first stopped in. Then I noticed that all the cabbies ate here and cabbies are usually excellent judges of good food, but then I wasn’t sure because there is a parking lot, and free parking is a hotter commodity than good, cheap food.”

Louis’ babbling now. And I’m thinking: Are we really talking about parking? When neither of us, as far as I can tell, owns a car here. I’m hit again by how I don’t know anything about him anymore, not the smallest detail.

The host takes us to a booth and Louis suddenly grimaces. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. You probably never eat in places like this anymore.”

He’s right, actually, not because I prefer darkened, overpriced, exclusive eateries but because those are the ones I get taken to and those are the ones I generally get left alone in. But this place is full of old grizzled New Yorkers and cabbies, no one who’d recognize me. “No, this place is good,” I say.

We sit down in a booth by the window, next to the vaunted parking lot. Two seconds later, a short, squat hairy guy is upon us. “Maestro,” he calls to Louis. “Long time no see.”

“Hi, Stavros.”

Stavros plops down our menus and turns to me. He raises a bushy eyebrow. “So, you finally bring your boyfriend for us to meet!”

Louis goes scarlet and, even though there’s something insulting in him being so embarrassed by being tagged as my boyfriend, there’s something comforting in seeing him blush. This uncomfortable boy is more like the person I knew, the kind who would never have hushed conversations on cell phones.

“He’s an old friend,” Louis says.

Old friend? Is that a demotion or a promotion?

“Old friend, huh? You never come in here with anyone before. Pretty, talented guy like you. Euphemia!” he bellows. “Come out here. The maestro has a fellow!”

Louis’ face has practically turned purple. When he looks up, he mouths: “The wife.”

Out of the kitchen trundles the female equivalent of Stavros, a short, square-shaped woman with a face full of makeup, half of which seems to have melted onto her jowly neck. She wipes her hands on her greasy white apron and smiles at Louis, showing off a gold tooth. “I knew it!” she exclaims. “I knew you had a boyfriend you were hiding. Pretty boy like you. Now I see why you don’t want to date my Georgie.”

Louis purses his lips and raises his eyebrow at me; he gives Euphemia a faux-guilty smile. Caught me.

“Now, come on, leave them be,” Stavros interjects, swatting Euphemia on the hip and edging in front of her. “Maestro, you want your usual?”

Louis nods.

“And your boyfriend?”

Louis actually cringes, and the silence at the table lengthens like dead air you still sometimes hear on college radio stations. “I’ll have a burger, fries, and a beer,” I say finally.

“Marvelous,” Stavros says, clapping his hands together like I’ve just given him the cure for cancer. “Cheeseburger Deluxe. Side of onion rings. Your young man is too skinny. Just like you.”

Louis cradles his head in his hands, as though he’s literally trying to disappear into his own body. After they leave, he peeks up. “God, that was, just, awkward. Clearly, they didn’t recognize you.”

“But they knew who you were. Wouldn’t have pegged them as classical music buffs.” Then I look down at my jeans, my white T-shirt, my beat-up boots. Once upon a time I’d been a classical music fan, too, so there’s no telling.

Louis laughs. “Oh, they’re not. Euphemia knows me from playing in the subway.”

“You busked in the subway? Times that tough?” And then I realize what I just said and want to hit rewind. You don’t ask someone like Louis if times are tough, even though I knew, financially, they weren’t. Brandon had taken out a supplemental life insurance policy in addition to the one he had through the teachers’ union and that had left Louis pretty comfortable, although no one knew about the second policy right away. It was one of the reasons that, after the accident, a bunch of the musicians in town had played a series of benefit concerts and raised close to five thousand pounds for Louis’ Oxford fund. The outpouring had moved his grandparents—and me, too—but it had infuriated Louis. He’d refused to take the donation, calling it blood money, and when his grandfather had suggested that accepting other people’s generosity was itself an act of generosity that might help people in the community feel better, he’d scoffed that it wasn’t his job to make other people feel better.

But Louis just smiles. “It was a blast. And surprisingly lucrative. Euphemia saw me and when I came here to eat, she remembered me from the Columbus Circle station. She proudly informed me that she’d put a whole dollar into my case.”

Louis’ phone rings. We both stop to listen to the tinny melody. Beethoven plays on and on.

“Are you going to get that?” I ask.

He shakes his head, looking vaguely guilty.

No sooner does the ringing stop then it pipes up again.

“You’re popular tonight.”

“Not so much popular as in trouble. I was supposed to be at this dinner after the concert. Lots of bigwigs. Agents. Donors. I’m pretty sure that’s either an Oxford professor, someone from Young Concert Artists, or my management calling to yell at me.”

“Or Ernesto?” I say as lightly as humanly possible. Because Stavros and Euphemia may have been on to something about Louis having some fancy-pants boyfriend—one that he doesn’t drag into Greek diners. He just isn’t me.

Louis looks uncomfortable again. “Could be.”

“If you have people to talk to, or, you know, business to attend to, don’t let me stand in your way.”

“No. I should just turn this off.” He reaches into his pocket and powers down the phone.

Stavros comes by with an iced tea for Louis and a Budweiser for me and leaves another awkward pause in his wake.

“So,” I begin.

“So,” Louis repeats.

“So, you have a usual at this place. This like your regular spot?”

“I come for the spanakopita and nagging. It’s close, so I used to come here a lot.”

Used to? For like the twentieth time tonight, I do the math. It’s been three years since Louis left for Oxford. That would make him a senior this fall. But he’s playing Carnegie Hall? He has management? I’m suddenly wishing I’d paid more attention to that article.

“Why not anymore?” My frustration echoes through the din.

Louis’ face prickles up to attention, and a little caterpillar of anxiety bunches up above the bridge of his nose. “What?” he says quickly.

“Aren’t you still in school?”

“Oh, that,” he says, relief unfurling his brow. “I should’ve explained it before. I graduated in the spring. Oxford has a three-year-degree option for . . .”

“Virtuosos.” I mean it as a compliment, but my annoyance at not having the baseball card on Louis Tomlinson—the stats, highlights, career bests—turns it bitter.

“Gifted students,” Louis corrects, almost apologetically. “I graduated early so I can start touring sooner. Now, actually. It all starts now.”

“Oh.”

We sit there in an awkward silence until Stavros arrives with the food. I didn’t think I was hungry when we ordered, but as soon as I smell the burger, my stomach starts rumbling. I realize all I’ve eaten today is a couple of hot dogs. Stavros lays down a bunch of plates in front of Louis, a salad, a spinach pie, French fries, rice pudding.

“That’s your regular?” I ask.

“I told you. I haven’t eaten in two days. And you know how I much I can put away. Or knew, I mean . . .”

“You need anything, Maestro, you just holler.”

“Thanks, Stavros.”

After he leaves, we both kill a few minutes drowning our fries and the conversation in ketchup.

“So . . .” I begin.

“So . . .” he repeats. Then: “How’s everyone. The rest of the band?”

“Good.”

“Where are they tonight?”

“London. Or on their way.”

Louis cocks his head to the side. “I thought you said you were going tomorrow.”

“Yeah, well, I had to tie up some loose ends. Logistics and all that. So I’m here an extra day.”

“Well that’s lucky.”

“What?”

“I mean . . . fortunate, because otherwise we wouldn’t have bumped into each other.”

I look at him. Is he serious? Ten minutes ago he looked like he was about to have a coronary at the mere possibility of being my boyfriend, and now he’s saying it’s lucky I stalked him tonight. Or is this merely the polite small talk portion of the evening?

“And how’s Liam? Is he still with Sophia?”

Oh, it is the small talk interlude. “Oh yeah, going strong. They want to get married and have this big debate about whether to do it in countryside like Doncaster or wait till they move to L.A. All that trouble to tie the knot.” I shake my head in disbelief.

“What, you don’t want to get married?” he asks, a hint of challenge in his voice.

It’s actually kind of hard to return his stare, but I force myself. “Never,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, sounding almost relieved.

Don’t panic, Louis. I wasn’t gonna propose.

“And you? Still in Doncaster?” he asks.

“Nope. I’m in L.A. now.”

“Another rain refugee flees west.”

“Yeah, something like that.” No need to tell him how the novelty of being able to eat dinner outside in February wore off quickly, and how now the lack of seasons seems fundamentally wrong. I’m like the opposite of those people who need to sit under sunlamps in the gloom of winter. In the middle of L.A.’s sunny non-winter, I need to sit in a dark closet to feel right. “I moved my parents down, too. The heat’s better for my dad’s arthritis.”

“Yeah, Gramps’s arthritis is pretty bad, too. In his hip.”

Arthritis? Could this be any more like a Christmas card update: And Billy finished swimming lessons, and Todd knocked up his girlfriend, and Aunt Louise had her bunions removed.

“Oh, that sucks,” I say.

“You know how he is. He’s all stoic about it. In fact, he and Gran are gearing up to do a lot of traveling to visit me on the road, got themselves new passports. Gran even found a horticulture student to look after her orchids when she’s away.”

“So how are your gran’s orchids?” I ask. Excellent. We’ve moved on to flowers now.

“Still winning prizes, so I guess they must be doing well.” Louis looks down. “I haven’t seen her greenhouse in a while. I haven’t been back there since I came out here.”

I’m both surprised by this—and not. It’s like I knew it already, even though I thought that once I skipped town, Louis might return. Once again, I’ve overestimated my importance.

“You should look them up sometime,” he says. “They’d be so happy to hear from you, to hear about how well you’re doing.”

“How well I’m doing?”

When I look up at him, he’s peering at me from under a waterfall of hair, shaking his head in wonder. “Yeah, Harry, how amazing you’re doing. I mean, you did it. You’re a rock star!”

Rock star. The words are so full of smoke and mirrors that it’s impossible to find a real person behind them. But I am a rock star. I have the bank account of a rock star and the platinum records of a rock star and the girlfriend of a rock star. But I fucking hate that term, and hearing Louis pin it on me ups the level of my loathing to a new stratosphere.

“Do you have any pictures of the rest of the band?” he asks. “On your phone or something?”

“Yeah, pictures. I have a ton on my phone, but it’s back at the hotel.” Total bullshit but he’ll never know. And if it’s pictures he wants, I can just get him a copy of Spin at a corner newsstand.

“I have some pictures. Mine are actual paper pictures because my phone is so ancient. I think I have some of Gran and Gramps, and oh, a great one of Jake and Amanda. They brought their kids to visit me at the Marlboro Festival last summer,” he tells me. “Alexa, or Lux as they call her, remember their little girl? She’s five now. And they had another baby, another little girl, Sally, named for Sarah.”

At the mention of Sarah’s name, my gut seizes up. In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person’s absence will affect you more than another’s. I loved Louis’ parents, but I could somehow accept their deaths. They’d gone too soon, but in the right order—parent before child—though, not, I supposed, from the perspective of Louis’ grandparents. But somehow I still can’t wrap my head around Sarah staying eight years old forever. Every year I get older, I think about how old Sarah would be, too. She’d be almost twelve now, and I see her in the face of every zitty adolescent girl who comes to our shows or begs an autograph.

I never told Louis about how much losing Sarah gutted me back when we were together, so there’s no way I’m gonna tell him now. I’ve lost my right to discuss such things. I’ve relinquished—or been relieved of—my seat at the Tomlinson family table.

“I took the picture last summer, so it’s a little old, but you get the idea of how everyone looks.”

“Oh, that’s okay.”

But Louis’ already rooting through his pockets. “Jake still looks the same, like an overgrown kid. Where is my wallet?” He heaves the jacket onto the table.

“I don’t want to see your pictures!” My voice is as sharp as ice cracking, as loud as a parent’s reprimand.

Louis stops his digging. “Oh. Okay.” He looks chastened, slapped down. He zips his pocket and slides it back into the booth, and in the process, knocks over my bottle of beer. He starts frantically grabbing at napkins from the dispenser to sop up the brew, like there’s battery acid leaking over the table. “Damn!” he says.

“It’s no big deal.”

“It is. I’ve made a huge mess,” Louis says breathlessly.

“You got most of it. Just call your buddy over and he’ll get the rest.”

He continues to clean maniacally until he’s emptied the napkin dispenser and used up every dry paper product in the vicinity. He balls up the soiled napkins and I think he’s about to go at the tabletop with his bare arm, and I’m watching the whole thing, slightly perplexed. Until Louis runs out of gas. He stops, hangs his head. Then he looks up at me with those eyes of his. “I’m sorry.”

I know the cool thing to do is say it’s okay, it’s no big deal, I didn’t even get beer on me. But all of a sudden I’m not sure we’re talking about beer, and if we’re not talking about beer, if Louis’ issuing some stealth apology . . .

What are you sorry about, Louis?

Even if I could bring myself to ask that—which I can’t—he’s jumping out of the booth and running toward the bathroom to clean the beer off himself.

He’s gone for a while, and as I wait the ambiguity he left in the booth curdles its way into the deepest part of me. Because I’ve imagined a lot of scenarios over the last three years. Most of them versions of this all being some kind of Huge Mistake, a giant misunderstanding. And a lot of my fantasies involve the ways in which Louis grovels for my forgiveness. Apologizes for returning my love with the cruelty of his silence. For acting as though two years of life—those two years of our lives—amount to nothing.

But I always stop short of the fantasy of him apologizing for leaving. Because even though he might not know it, he just did what I told him he could do.


	9. NINE

There were signs. Probably more of them than I ever caught, even after the fact. But I missed them all. Maybe because I wasn’t looking for them. I was too busy checking over my shoulder at the fire I’d just come through to pay much attention to the thousand-foot cliff looming in front of me.

When Louis had decided to go to Oxford that fall, and when by late that spring it became clear that he’d be able to, I’d said I’d go with him to Oxford. He’d just given me this look, no way. “That was never on the table before,” he said, “so why should it be now?”

Because before you were a whole person but now you don’t have a spleen. Or parents. Because Oxford might swallow you alive, I’d thought. I didn’t say anything.

“It’s time for both of us to get back to our lives,” he continued. I’d only been at the university part-time before but had just stopped going after the accident and now had a term’s worth of incompletes. Louis hadn’t been back to school, either. He’d missed too much of it, and now he worked with a tutor to finish up his senior year classes so he could graduate and go to Oxford on time. It was more going through the motions. His teachers would pass him even if he never turned in another assignment.

“And what about the band?” he asked. “I know they’re all waiting on you.” Also true. Just before the accident, we’d recorded a self-titled record on Higher Rhythm, a Doncaster-based independent label. The album had come out at the beginning of the summer, and even though we hadn’t toured to support it, the CD had been selling up a storm, getting tons of play on college radio stations. As a result, White Eskimo now had major labels circling, all interested in signing a band that existed only in theory. “Your poor guitar is practically dying of neglect,” he said with a sad smile. It hadn’t been out of its case since our aborted opening act for 1975.

So, I agreed to the long-distance thing. In part because there was no arguing with Louis. In part because I really didn’t want to quit White Eskimo. But also, I was kind of cocky about the distance. I mean, before I’d been worried about what the distance would do to us. But now? What the hell could one hundred and fifty-three miles do to us now? And besides, Hannah had accepted a spot at London University, a few miles from Oxford. She’d keep an eye on Louis.

Except, then Hannah made a last-minute change and switched to University in Manchester. I was furious about this. After the accident, we frequently had little chats about Louis’ progress and passed along pertinent info to her grandparents. We kept our talks secret, knowing Louis would’ve killed us had he thought we were conspiring. But Hannah and I, we were like co-captains of Team Louis. If I couldn’t move to Oxford with Louis, I felt Hannah had a responsibility to stay near him.

I stewed about this for a while until one hot July night about a month before she and Louis were due to leave. Hannah had come over to Louis’ grandparents house to watch DVDs with us. Louis had gone to bed early so it was just the two of us finishing some pretentious foreign movie. Hannah kept trying to talk to me about Louis, how well he was doing, and was jabbering over the film like a noisy parrot. I finally told her to shut up. Her eyes narrowed and she started gathering her stuff. “I know what you’re upset about and it’s not this lame movie, so why don’t you just yell at me about it already and get it over with,” she said. Then she’d burst out crying. I’d never seen Hannah cry, full-on like this, not even at the memorial service, so I’d immediately felt like crap and apologized and sort of awkwardly hugged her.

After she’d finished sniveling, she’d dried her eyes and explained how Louis had made her choose The University of Manchester. “I mean, it’s where I really want to go. After so long in Doncaster, I really wanted to be at a school close to home, but London Uni was fine. But, he was fierce on this. He said he didn’t want ‘any more babysitting.’ Those were his exact words. He swore that if I went to London, he’d know it was because we’d hatched a plan to keep an eye on him. He said he’d cut ties with me. I told him I didn’t believe him, but he had a look in his eye I’d never seen. He was serious. So I did it. Do you know how many strings I had to pull to get my spot back this late in the game? Plus, I lost my tuition deposit at London Uni. But whatever, it made Louis happy and not a lot does these days.” Hannah smiled ruefully. “So I’m not sure why it’s making me feel so miserable. Guilt, I guess. Religious hazard.” Then she’d started crying again.

Pretty loud sign. I guess I had my fingers in my ears.

But the end, when it finally came, was quiet.

Louis went to Oxford. I moved back to the House of Rock. I went back to school. The world didn’t end. For the first couple of weeks, Louis and I sent each other these epic emails. His were all about Oxford, his classes, music, school. Mine were all about our record-label meetings. Liam had scheduled a bunch of gigs for us around Thanksgiving—and we had some serious practicing to do before then, given that I hadn’t picked up a guitar in months—but, at Zayn’s insistence, we were seeing to business first. We were traveling to Manchester and London. and meeting label execs. Some A&R guys from New York were coming out to Doncaster to see us. I told Louis about the promises they made, how each of them said they’d hone our sound and launch us to superstardom. All of us in the band tried to keep it in check, but it was hard not to inhale their stardust.

Louis and I also had a phone call check-in every night before he went to bed. He was usually pretty wiped so the conversations were short; a chance to hear one another’s voice, to say I love you in real time.

One night about three weeks into the semester, I was a little late calling because we were meeting one of the A&R reps for dinner at Le Pigeon in Manchester and everything ran a little late. When my call went to voice mail, I figured he’d already gone to sleep.

But the next day, there was no email from him. “Sorry I was late. U pissed @ me?” I texted him.

“No,” he texted right back. And I was relieved.

But that night, I called on time, and that call went right to voice mail. And the next day, the email from Louis was a terse two sentences, something about orchestra getting very intense. So I justified it. Things were starting to heat up. He was at Oxford, after all. His piano didn’t have WiFi. And this was Louis, the boy known to practice eight hours a day.

But then I started calling at different times, waking up early so I could get him before classes, calling during his dinnertime. And my calls kept going to voice mail, never getting returned. He didn’t return my texts either. I was still getting emails, but not every day, and even though my emails were full of increasingly desperate questions—“Why aren’t you picking up your cell?” “Did you lose it? Are you okay?”—his responses glossed right over everything. He just claimed to be busy.

I decided to go visit his grandparents. I’d pretty much lived with them for five months while Louis was recovering and had promised to visit frequently but I’d reneged on that. I found it hard to be in that drafty old house with its photo gallery of ghosts—a wedding portrait of Brandon and Lauren, a gut-wrenching shot of twelve-year-old Louis reading to Sarah on his lap—without Louis beside me. But with Louis’ contact dwindling, I needed answers.

The first time I went that fall, Louis’ grandmother talked my ear off about the state of her garden and then went out to her greenhouse, leaving me to sit in the kitchen with her grandfather. He brewed us a strong pot of coffee. We didn’t say much, so all you could hear was the crackling of the woodstove. He just looked at me in that quiet sad way that made me inexplicably want to kneel at the foot of his chair and put my head in his lap.

I went back a couple more times, even after Louis had cut off contact with me completely, and it was always like that. I felt kind of bad pretending that I was there on social calls when really I was hoping for some news, some explanation. No, what I was really hoping for was not to be the odd man out. I wanted them to say: “Louis has stopped calling us. Has he been in touch with you?” But, of course, that never happened because that never would happen.

The thing was, I didn’t need any confirmation from Louis’ grandparents. I knew from that second night when my call went to voice mail, that it was the end of the line for me.

Because hadn’t I told him? Hadn’t I stood over his body and promised him that I’d do anything if he stayed, even if it meant letting him go? The fact that he’d been in a coma when I’d said this, hadn’t woken up for another three days, that neither of us had ever mentioned what I’d said—that seemed almost irrelevant. I’d brought this on myself.

The thing I can’t wrap my head around is how he did it. I’ve never dumped a boy with such brutality. Even back when I did the groupie thing, I’d always escort the guy du jour out of my hotel room or limo or whatever, give him a chaste kiss on the cheek and a “Thanks, that was a lot of fun,” or something with a similar note of finality in it. And that was a groupie. Louis and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high-school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had he not been some piano prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise—or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this—I was pretty sure it would’ve been.

I’ve come to realize there’s a world of difference between knowing something happened, even knowing why it happened, and believing it. Because when he cut off contact, yeah, I knew what had happened. But it took me a long, long time to believe it.

Some days, I still don’t quite believe it.


	10. TEN

And yeah I let you use me from the day that we first met

But I’m not done yet

Falling for your fool’s gold

And I knew that you turned it on for everyone you met

But I don’t regret falling for your fool’s gold

 “FOOL’S GOLD”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 6

After we leave the diner, I start to feel nervous. Because we bumped into each other. We did the polite thing and stuck around to catch up, so what’s left except our good-byes? But I’m not ready for that. I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be another postscript with Louis, and I’m gonna have to live on the fumes of tonight for the rest of my life, so I’d like a little more to show for it than parking lots and arthritis and aborted apologies.

Which is why every block we walk that Louis doesn’t hail a cab or make excuses and say good night feels like a stay of execution. In the sound of my footsteps slapping against the pavement, I can almost hear the word, reprieve, reprieve, echo through the city streets.

We walk in silence down a much-quieter, muchscummier stretch of Ninth Avenue. Underneath a dank overpass, a bunch of homeless guys camp out. One asks for some spare change. I toss him a ten. A bus goes by, blasting a cloud of diesel exhaust.

Louis points across the street. “That’s the Port Authority Bus Terminal,” he says.

I just nod, not sure if we’re going to discuss bus stations with the same amount of detail we did parking lots, or if he’s planning on sending me away.

“There’s a bowling alley inside,” he tells me.

“In the bus station?”

“Crazy right?!” Louis exclaims, suddenly all animated. “I couldn’t believe it when I found it either. I was coming home from visiting my friend Kim in Boston late one night and got lost on the way out and there it was. It reminded me of Easter egg hunts. Do you remember how Sarah and I used to get about those?”

I remember how Louis used to get. He’d been a sucker for any holiday that had a candy association—especially making it fun for Sarah. One Easter he’d painstakingly hand-colored hard-boiled eggs and hidden them all over the yard for Sarah’s hunt the next morning. But then it poured all night and all his colorful eggs had turned a mottled gray. Louis had been tearfully disappointed, but Sarah had practically peed herself with excitement—the eggs, she declared, weren’t Easter eggs; they were dinosaur eggs.

“Yeah, I remember,” I say.

“Everyone loves New York City for all these different reasons. The culture. The mix of people. The pace. The food. But for me, it’s like one epic Easter egg hunt. You’re always finding these little surprises around every corner. Like that garden. Like a bowling alley in a giant bus depot. You know—” He stops.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “You probably have something going tonight. A club. An entourage to meet.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t do entourage, Louis.” It comes out harder than I intended.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. I just assumed all rock stars, celebrities, traveled with packs.”

“Stop assuming. I’m still me.” Sort of.

He looks surprised. “Okay. So you don’t have anywhere you need to be?”

I shake my head.

“It’s late. Do you need to get to sleep?”

“I don’t do much of that these days. I can sleep on the plane.”

“So . . .” Louis kicks away a piece of trash with his toe, and I realize he’s still nervous. “Let’s go on an urban Easter egg hunt.” He pauses, searches my face to see if I know what he’s talking about, and of course I know exactly what he’s talking about. “I’ll show you all the secret corners of the city that I love so much.”

“Why?” I ask him. And then as soon as I ask the question, I want to kick myself. You got your reprieve, now shut up! But part of me does want to know. If I’m unclear why I went to his concert tonight, I’m thoroughly confused as to why he called me to him, why I’m still here.

“Because I’d like to show you,” he says simply. I stare at him, waiting for him to elaborate. His brows knit as he tries to explain. Then he seems to give up. He just shrugs. After a minute he tries again: “Also, I’m not exactly leaving New York, but I sort of am. I go to Japan tomorrow to do two concerts there and then one in Korea. And after that I come back to New York for a week and then I really start touring. I’ll be on the road for maybe forty weeks a year, so . . .”

“Not much time for egg hunting?”

“Something like that.”

“So this would be like your farewell tour?” Of New York? Of me?

A little late for me.

“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” Louis replies.

I pause, as though I’m actually considering this, as though I’m weighing my options, as though the RSVP to his invitation is in question. Then I shrug, put on a good show, “Sure, why not?”

But I’m still a little iffy about the bus station, so I put on my shades and cap before we go inside. Louis leads me through an orange-tiled hall, the aroma of pine disinfectant not quite masking the smell of piss, and up a series of escalators, past shuttered newsstands and fastfood restaurants, up more escalators to a neon sign blaring LEISURE TIME BOWL.

“Here we are,” he says shyly, proudly. “After I found it by accident, I made a habit of peeking in any time I was in the station. And then I started coming here just to hang out. Sometimes I sit at the bar and order nachos and watch people bowl.”

“Why not bowl yourself?”

Louis tilts his head to the side, then taps his elbow.

Ahh, his elbow. His Achilles’ heel. One of the few parts of his body that, it seemed, hadn’t been hurt in the accident, hadn’t been encased in plaster or put together with pins or stitches or touched by skin grafts. But when he’d started playing piano again in that mad attempt to catch up with himself, his elbow had started to hurt. X-rays were taken. MRIs done. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, told him it might be a bad bruise or a contused nerve, and suggested he ease off the practicing, which had set Louis off. He said if he couldn’t play, he had nothing left. What about me? I remember thinking, but never saying. Anyhow, he’d ignored the doctors and played through the pain and either it had gotten better or he’d gotten used to it.

“I tried to get some people from Oxford to come down a few times, but they weren’t into it. But it doesn’t matter,” he tells me. “It’s the place I love. How it’s totally secreted away up here. I don’t need to bowl to appreciate it.”

So your Garden-of-Eden boyfriend is too highbrow for greasy diners and bowling alleys, huh?

Louis and I used to go bowling, sometimes the two of us, other times with his whole family. Lauren and Brandon had been big bowlers, part of Brandon’s whole retro thing. Even Sarah could hit an eighty. Like it or not, Louis Tomlinson, you have a bit of grunge twined into your DNA, thanks to your family. And, maybe, thanks to me.

“We could go bowling now,” I suggest.

Louis smiles at the offer. Then taps his elbow again. He shakes his head.

“You don’t have to bowl,” I explain. “I’ll bowl. You can watch. Just for you to get the whole effect. Or I can even bowl for both of us. It seems like you should have one game here. This being your farewell tour.”

“You’d do that for me?” And it’s the surprise in his voice that gets to me.

“Yeah, why not? I haven’t been bowling in ages.” This isn’t entirely true. Kendall and I went bowling a few months ago for some charity thing. We paid twenty thousand bucks to rent a lane for an hour for some worthy cause and then we didn’t even bowl; just drank champagne while Kendall schmoozed. I mean who drinks champagne at a bowling alley?

Inside Leisure Time, it smells like beer—and wax and hot dogs and shoe disinfectant. It’s what a bowling alley should smell like. The lanes are full of an unusually unattractive grouping of New Yorkers who actually seem to be bowling for the sake of bowling. They don’t look twice at us; they don’t even look once at us. I book us a lane and rent us each a pair of shoes. Full treatment here.

Louis’ practically giddy as he tries his on, doing a little soft-shoe as he selects a ladies’ pink eight-pounder for me to bowl with on his behalf.

“What about names?” Louis asks.

Back in the day, we always went for musicians; he’d choose an old-school punk female singer and I’d pick a male classical musician. Joan and Frederic. Or Debbie and Ludwig.

“You pick,” I say, because I’m not exactly sure how much of the past we’re supposed to be reliving. Until I see the names he inputs. And then I almost fall over. Lauren and Brandon.

When he sees my expression he looks embarrassed. “They liked to bowl, too,” he hastily explains, quickly changing the names to Bauren and Grandon. “How’s that?” he asks a little too cheerfully

Two letters away from morbid, I think. My hand is shaking again as I step up to the lane with “Bauren’s” pink ball, which might explain why I only knock down eight pins. Louis doesn’t care. He squeals with delight. “A spare will be mine,” he yells. Then catches his outburst and looks down at his feet. “Thanks for renting me the shoes. Nice touch.”

“No problem.”

“How come nobody recognizes you here?” he asks.

“It’s a context thing.”

“Maybe you can take off your sunglasses. It’s kind of hard talking to you in them.”

I forgot that I still had them on and feel stupid for it, and stupid for having to wear them in the first place. I take them off.

“Better,” Louis says. “I don’t get why classical musicians think bowling is white trash. It’s so fun.”

I don’t know why this little Oxford-snobs-versus-the-rest-of-us should make me feel a little digging thrill, but it does. I knock down the remaining two of Louis’ pins. He cheers, loudly.

“Did you like it? Oxford?” I ask. “Was it everything you thought it’d be?”

“No,” he says, and again, I feel this strange sense of victory. Until he elaborates. “It was more.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t start out that way, though. It was pretty rocky at first.”

“That’s not surprising, you know, all things considered.”

“That was the problem. ‘All things considered.’ Too many things considered. When I first got there, it was like everywhere else; people were very considerate. My roommate was so considerate that she couldn’t look at me without crying.”

The Over-Empathizer—her I remember. I got cut off a few weeks into her.

“All my roommates were drama queens. I changed so many times the first year before I finally moved out of the dorms. Do you know I’ve lived in eleven different places there? I think that must be some kind of record.”

“Consider it practice for being on the road.”

“Do you like being on the road?”

“No.”

“Really? Getting to see all those different countries. I would’ve thought you’d love that.”

“All I get to see is the hotel and the venue and the blur of the countryside from the window of a tour bus.”

“Don’t you ever sightsee?”

The band does. They go out on these private VIP tours, hit the Rome Colosseum before it’s open to the public and things like that. I could tag along, but it would mean going with the band, so I just wind up holed up in my hotel. “There’s not usually time,” I lie. “So you were saying, you had roommate issues.”

“Yeah,” Louis continues. “Sympathy overload. It was like that with everyone, including the faculty, who were all kind of nervous around me, when it should’ve been the opposite. It’s kind of a rite of passage when you first take orchestra to have your playing deconstructed—basically picked apart—in front of everyone. And it happened to everybody. Except me. It was like I was invisible. Nobody dared critique me. And trust me, it wasn’t because my playing was so great.”

“Maybe it was,” I say. I edge closer, dry my hands over the blower.

“No. It wasn’t. One of the courses you have to take when you first start is String Quartet Survey. And one of the profs is this guy Lemsky. He’s a bigwig in the department. Russian. Imagine every cruel stereotype you can think of, that’s him. Mean, shriveled-up little man. Straight out of Dostoyevsky. My dad would’ve loved him. After a few weeks, I get called into his office. This is not usually a happy sign.

“He’s sitting behind this messy wooden desk, with papers and sheet music piled high. And he starts telling me about his family. Jews in the Ukraine. Lived through pogroms. Then through World War II. Then he says, ‘Everyone has hardship in their life. Everyone has pain. The faculty here will coddle you because of what you went through. I, however, am of the opinion if we do that, that car crash might as well have killed you, too, because we will smother your talent. Do you want us to do that?’

“And, I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stood there. And then he yelled at me: ‘Do you? Do you want us to smother you?’ And I manage to eke out a ‘no.’ And he says, ‘Good.’ Then he picks up his baton and sort of flicks me out with it.”

I can think of places I’d like to stick that guy’s baton. I grab my ball and hurl it down the lane. It hits the pin formation with a satisfying thwack; the pins go flying in every direction, like little humans fleeing Godzilla. When I get back to Louis, I’m calmer.

“Nice one,” he says at the same time I say, “Your professor sounds like a dick!”

“True, he’s not the most socially graced. And I was freaked out at the time, but looking back I think that was one of the most important days of my life. Because he was the first person who didn’t just give me a pass.”

I turn, glad to have a reason to walk away from him so he can’t see the look on my face. I throw his pink ball down the lane, but the torque is off and it veers to the right. I get seven down and the remaining three are split. I only pick off one more on my next go. To even things up, I purposely blow my next frame, knocking down six pins.

“So, a few days later, in orchestra,” Louis continues, “my glissando gets taken apart, and not very kindly.” He grins, awash in happy memories of his humiliation.

“Nothing like a public flogging.”

“Right!? It was great. It was like the best therapy in the world.”

I look at him. “Therapy” was once a forbidden word. Louis had been assigned a grief counselor in the hospital and rehab but had refused to continue seeing anyone once he’d come home, something Hannah and I had argued against. But Louis had claimed that talking about his dead family an hour a week wasn’t therapeutic.

“Once that happened, it was like everyone else on the faculty relaxed around me,” he tells me. “Lemsky rode me extra hard. No time off. No life that wasn’t piano. Summers I played festivals. Aspen. Then Marlboro. Then Lemsky and Ernesto both pushed me to audition for the Young Concert Artists program, which was insane. It makes getting into Oxford look like a cakewalk. But I did it. And I got in. That’s why I was at Carnegie tonight. Twenty-year-olds don’t normally play recitals at Zankel Hall. And that’s just thrown all these doors wide open. I have management now. I have agents interested in me. And that’s why Lemsky pushed for early graduation. He said I was ready to start touring, though I don’t know if he’s right.”

“From what I heard tonight, he’s right.”

His face is suddenly so eager, so young, it almost hurts. “Do you really think so? I’ve been playing recitals and festivals, but this will be different. This will be me on my own, or soloing for a few nights with an orchestra or a quartet or a chamber music ensemble.” He shakes his head. “Some days I think I should just find a permanent position in an orchestra, have some continuity. Like you have with the band. It has to be such a comfort to always be with Liam, Zayn, and Niall.” The stage changes, but the players stay the same.

I think of the band, on an airplane as we speak, speeding across the Atlantic—an ocean, the least of the things, dividing us now. And then I think of Louis, of the way he played the Beethoven, of what all the people in the theater were saying after he left the stage. “No, you shouldn’t do that. That would be a waste of your talent.”

“Now you sound like Lemsky.”

“Great.”

Louis laughs. “Oh, I know he comes across as such a hard-ass, but I suspect deep down he’s doing this because he thinks by giving me a shot at a career, he’ll help fill some void.”

Louis stops and turns to me, his eyes dead on mine, searching, reaching. “But he doesn’t have to give me the career. That’s not what fills the void. You understand that, right? You always understood that.”

Suddenly, all the shit from the day comes ricocheting back—Vanessa and Kendall and the bump watches and Shuffle and the looming sixty-seven days of separate hotels and awkward silences and playing shows with a band behind me that no longer has my back.

And it’s like, Louis, don’t you get it? The music is the void. And you’re the reason why.


	11. ELEVEN

White Eskimo had always been a band with a code—feelings first, business second—so I hadn’t given the band much thought, hadn’t considered their feelings, or their resentments, about my extended leave. I figured they’d get my absence without my having to explain.

After I came out of my haze and wrote those first ten songs, I called Liam, who organized a band dinner/meeting. During dinner, we sat around the Club Table—so named because Liam had taken this fugly 1970s wooden dining table we’d found on the curb and covered it with band flyers and about a thousand layers of lacquer to resemble the inside of a club. First, I apologized for going MIA. Then I pulled out my laptop and played them recordings of the new stuff I’d been writing. Liam’s and Niall’s eyes went wide. They dangled vegetable lasagna in front of their mouths as they listened to track after track: “Illusion,” “Fireproof,” “No Control,” “Ready to Run,” “18.”

“Mate, we thought you were just packing it in, working some crap-ass job and pining, but you’ve been productive,” Niall exclaimed. “This shit rocks.”

Liam nodded. “It does. And it’s beautiful, too. It must have been cathartic,” he said, reaching over to squeeze my hand. “I’d love to read the lyrics. Do you have them on your computer?”

“Scrawled on paper at home. I’ll transcribe them and email them to you.”

“Home? Isn’t this home?” Liam asked. “Your room is an untouched museum. Why don’t you move back?”

“Not much to move. Unless you sold my stuff.”

“We tried. Too dusty. No takers,” Niall said. “We’ve been using your bed as a hat rack, though.” Niall shot me a wiseass grin. I’d made the mistake of telling him how I’d thought I was turning into my dead grandfather, with all his weird superstitions, like his vehement belief that hats on beds bring bad luck.

“Don’t worry, we’ll burn sage,” Liam said. Clearly Niall had alerted the media.

“So, what, that’s it?” Zayn said, tapping his nails against my laptop.

“Mate, that’s ten songs,” Niall said, a piece of spinach in his giant grin. “Ten insanely good songs. That’s practically an album. We already have enough to go into the studio.”

“Those are just the ones that are done,” I interrupted. “I’ve got at least ten more coming. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re just kinda flowing out of me right now, like they’re already written and recorded and someone just pressed play. I’m getting it all out as fast I can.”

“Obey the muse,” Liam said. “She’s a fickle mistress.”

“I’m not talking about the songs,” Zayn said. “We don’t even know if there will be any album. If any of the labels will still want us. We had all this forward momentum and he basically killed it.”

“He didn’t kill anything,” Liam said. “For one, it’s only been a few months, and second of all, our Midnight Memories album has been ripping up the indie charts, getting tons of play on the college stations. And I’ve been working the college angle pretty well,” Liam continued, “with interviews and all, to keep the embers burning.”

“And dude, ‘Strong’ has even crossed over; it’s getting play on satellite radio stations,” Niall said. “I’m sure all those A&R guys will be happy to see us, shitting bricks to hear this.”

“You don’t know,” Zayn said. “They have their trends. Quotas. The outfits they want. And my point is, he”—he jabbed a finger at me—“ditches the band without a word and just waltzes back like it’s no big deal.”

Zayn had a point, but it wasn’t like I held anyone back. “Look, I’m sorry. We all go off the cliff sometimes. But you could’ve replaced me if you’d wanted to. Gotten a new guitar player and your major-label deal.”

By the quick look that passed among the three of them, I could see that this option had been discussed, and likely vetoed by Liam. White Eskimo was a democratic outfit; we’d always made decisions together. But when it came down to it, the band was Liam’s. He started it and recruited me to play guitar after seeing me play around town. Then he’d lassoed Niall and Zayn, so ultimately a personnel change would’ve been his call. Maybe this was why Zayn had started playing gigs with another singer under the name of Naughty Boy.

“Zayn, I don’t get what you want out of this,” Niall said. “Do you want a box of chocolates? Do you want Harry to get you a nice bouquet to say sorry?”

“Piss off, Ni,” Zayn said.

“I’ll buy you flowers,” I offered. “Yellow roses. I believe those symbolize friendship. Whatever it takes, I’ll do what I’m told.”

“Will that make it good?” Niall continued. “Because what the fuck, man? We have these amazing songs. I wish I’d written those songs. But Harry did. He came through. And we have him back. So maybe now we can get back to making kick-ass music and see where it takes us. And maybe, you know, let our kid get a little joy back in his life. So, dude. Bygones.”

Zayn’s worries turned out to be unfounded. Some of the major labels that had been courting us in the fall had cooled on us, but a handful were still interested, and when we sent them the demos of the songs that would become Stockholm Syndrome they went ballistic, and we were signed and in the studio with Julian before we knew it.

And for a while, things were good. Niall and Liam were both right. Recording Stockholm Syndrome was cathartic. And there was joy. Working with Julian was intense; he brought out the noise in us, told us not to be scared of our raw power, and we all ran with it. And it was cool being up in Manchester recording and staying in a corporate apartment and feeling like The Beatles. Everything seemed good.

Not long after the record came out, the tour started. A five-month slog through North America, Europe, and Asia that, at the outset, seemed like the most exciting thing in the world. And in the beginning, it was. But it was also grueling. And soon I was tired all the time. And lonely. There was a lot of empty time in which to miss him. I kind of holed away in my hotel rooms, the backs of tour buses. I pushed everyone away. Even Liam. Especially Liam. He wasn’t stupid; he knew what was going on—and why. And he wasn’t some fragile flower, either. He kept after me. So I burrowed, until, I guess, he got tired of trying to dig me out.

As the tour went on, the album just started going haywire. Platinum. Then double-platinum. The tour dates sold out, so our promoters added additional ones to meet demand. The merchandising deals were everywhere. White Eskimo T-shirts, caps, posters, stickers, even a special-edition White Eskimo onesies. Suddenly, the press was all over us. Interviews all the time, which was flattering at first. People cared enough about us to read what we had to say.

But a weird thing started to happen in interviews. The reporter would sit the band down together, ask some perfunctory questions to us all, and then turn the microphone or camera on me. And I tried to open it up to the rest of the band. That’s when reporters started requesting interviews with just me, a request I uniformly turned down, until it suddenly became impossible for us to do interviews any other way.

About four months into the tour, we were in Rome. Rolling Stone had sent a reporter to spend a few days with us. One night, after a show, we were closing the hotel bar. It was a pretty mellow scene and we were sitting around, decompressing, pounding grappa. But then the reporter starts firing away with all these heavy-duty questions. All to me. I mean, there were about a dozen of us in there—me, Liam, Niall, Zayn, Paul, some roadies, some groupies—but this guy was acting like I was the only person in the room. “Harry, do you see Stockholm Syndrome as having a single narrative? If so, can you elaborate on it?” “Harry, do think this record represents your growth as a songwriter?” “Harry, you’ve mentioned in other interviews you don’t want to go down ‘that dark rock star path,’ but how do you keep from suffocating on your own fumes?”

Zayn just lost it. “You hijacked the band!” he screamed at me, like it was just the two of us in a room, like there wasn’t a reporter right there. “This isn’t just the Harry Styles Show, you know. We’re a band. A unit. There are four of us. Or did you forget that, on your way down the ‘dark rock star path?’”

Zayn turned to the reporter. “You wanna know about the illustrious Harry Styles? I’ve got some choice details. Like our rock star over here has to do this crazy voodoo shit before each show and is such a prima donna that if you whistle backstage before a show he has a tantrum because of the bad luck—”

“Zayn, come on,” Liam interrupted sharply. “All artists have their rituals.”

The reporter, meanwhile, was scribbling away, eating all this up until Paul diplomatically said that everyone was tired and shooed everyone but the band out of the bar and tried to get me and Zayn to make nice. But then Zayn just let loose for round two of insults, telling me what a spotlight-hogging asshole I’d become. I looked over at Liam to come to my defense again, but he was staring intently at his drink. So I turned to Niall, but he just shook his head. “I never thought I’d be the one to say this, but grow up, you two.” Then he left. I looked pleadingly at Liam. He looked sympathetic, but tired. “Zayn, you were out of line in there,” he said flatly. But then he turned to me and shook his head. “But, Harry, come on. You’ve got to try to see it from his perspective. From all of ours. It’s tough to be big about this, especially when you’ve retreated from us. I get why you have, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”

All of them—they were all against me. I waved my hands in surrender. I ran out of the bar, strangely close to tears. In the lobby, this radio Dj named Nick, who’d been hanging with us, was waiting for a taxi. He smiled when he saw me. When his taxi came, he gestured with his head, inviting me inside. And I went. The next day, I checked into a different hotel from the band.

The story hit RollingStone.com almost immediately and the tabloids a few days later. Our label freaked, as did our tour promoters, all of whom warned of the various forms of hell there would be to pay if we didn’t honor our concert commitments. Paul flew in a professional mediator to talk to me and Zayn. He was useless. His genius idea, a legacy that continues to this day, is what Niall refers to as “The Divorce.” I would continue to stay at one hotel for the remainder of the tour, the rest of the band at another. And our publicists decided it was safer to keep me and Zayn separate in interviews, so now reporters often talk to me solo. Yeah, those changes have helped a lot!

When I got back from the Stockholm Syndrome tour, I almost quit the band. I moved out of the house I’d been sharing with Niall in Manchester and into my own place. I avoided those guys. I was angry, but also ashamed. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d clearly ruined everything. I might’ve just let the run end there, but Liam stopped by my new place one afternoon and asked me to just give it a few months’ breathing space and see how I felt. “Anyone would be going a little nuts after the couple years we’ve had, especially the couple of years you’ve had,” he’d said, which was about as much as we acknowledged Louis. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just asking you to not do anything and see how you feel in a few months.”

Then the album started winning all these awards, and then I met Kendall and moved to L.A. and didn’t have to deal with them much, so I just wound up getting sucked in for another round.

Kendall’s the only person who knows how close to the edge that tour pushed me, and how badly I’ve been dreading this upcoming one. “Cut them loose,” is her solution. She thinks I have some sort of guilt complex, coming from humble origins and all, and that’s why I won’t go solo. “Look, I get it. It’s hard to accept that you deserve the acclaim, but you do. You write all the songs and most of the music and that’s why you get all the attention,” she tells me. “You’re the talent! Not just some pretty face. If this were a movie, you’d be the twenty-million-dollar star and they’d be the supporting players, but instead you all get an equal split,” she says. “You don’t need them. Especially with all the grief they give you.”

But it’s not about the money. It never has been. And going solo doesn’t seem like much of a solution. It would just be out of the frying pan and into the fire. And there’d still be touring to contend with, the thought of which has been making me physically sick.

“Why don’t you call Dr. Weisbluth?” Kendall suggested on the phone from Toronto, where she was wrapping her latest photoshoot. Weisbluth’s the psychopharmacologist the label had hooked me up with a few months earlier. “See if he can give you something a little stronger. And when you get back, we need to have a sit-down with Matthew and seriously talk about you going solo. But you have to get through this tour. You’ll blow your reputation otherwise.”

There are worse things to blow than your reputation, aren’t there? That’s what I thought. But I didn’t say it. I just called Weisbluth, got some more scripts, and steeled myself for the tour. I guess Kendall understood, like I understood, like everyone who knew me understood, that in spite of his bad-boy rep, Harry Styles does as he’s told.


	12. TWELVE

Who’s that shadow holding me hostage I’ve been here for days

Who’s this whisper telling me that I’m never gonna get away

 “STOCKHOLM SYNDROME”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 11

Louis doesn’t tell me what the next destination is. Says because it’s his secret New York tour, it should be a secret and then proceeds to lead me out of Port Authority down, down, down into a warren of subway tunnels.

And I follow him. Even though I don’t like secrets, even though I think that Louis and I have enough secrets between the two of us at this point, and even though the subway is like the culmination of all my fears. Enclosed spaces. Lots of people. No escape. I sort of mention this to him, but he throws back what I said earlier in the bowling alley about context. “Who’s going to be expecting Harry Styles on the subway at three in the morning? Without an entourage?” He gives me a joking smile. “Besides, it should be dead at this hour. And in my New York, I always take the train.”

When we reach the Times Square subway station, the place is so crowded that it might as well be five P.M. on a Thursday. My warning bell starts to ping. Even more so once we get to the thronged platform. I stiffen and back toward one of the pillars. Louis gives me a look. “This is a bad idea,” I mumble, but my worries are drowned out by the oncoming train.

“The trains don’t run often at night, so it must be that everyone’s been waiting for a while,” Louis shouts over the clatter. “But here comes one now, so look, everything’s fine.”

When we get on the N, we both see that Louis’ wrong. The car’s packed with people. Drunk people.

I feel the itchiness of eyes on me. I know I’m out of pills, but I need a cigarette. Now. I reach for my pack.

“You can’t smoke on the train,” Louis whispers.

“I need to.”

“It’s illegal.”

“I don’t care.” If I get arrested, at least I’d be in the safety of police custody.

Suddenly, he goes all Vulcan. “If the purpose is to not call attention to yourself, don’t you think that perhaps lighting up is counterproductive?” He pulls me into a corner. “It’s fine,” he croons, and I half expect him to caress my neck like he used to do when I’d get tense. “We’ll just hang out here. If it doesn’t empty out at Thirty-fourth Street, we’ll get off.”

At Thirty-fourth, a bunch of people do get off, and I feel a little better. At Fourteenth more people get off. But then suddenly at Canal, our car fills up with a group of hipsters. I angle myself into the far end of the train, near the conductor’s booth, so my back is to the riders.

It’s hard for most people to understand how freaked out I get by large crowds in small contained spaces now. I think it would be hard for the me of three years ago to understand. But that me never had the experience of minding his own business at a small record shop in Minneapolis when one guy recognized me and shouted out my name and it was like watching popcorn kernels in hot oil: First one went, then another, then an explosion of them, until all these sedate record-store slackers suddenly became a mob, surrounding me, then tackling me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.

It sucks because I like the fans when I meet them individually, I do. But get a group of them together and this swarm instinct takes over and they seem to forget that you’re a mere mortal: flesh and bone, bruisable and scareable.

But we seem okay in the corner. Until I make the fatal mistake of doing just one final check over my shoulder to make sure no one’s looking at me. And in that little quarter second, it happens. I catch someone’s eye. I feel the recognition ignite like a match. I can almost smell the phosphorus in the air. Then everything seems to happen in slow motion. First, I hear it. It goes unnaturally quiet. And then there’s a low buzz as the news travels. I hear my name, in stage whispers, move across the noisy train. I see elbows nudged. Cell phones reached for, bags grabbed, forces rallied, legs shuffling. None of this takes longer than a few seconds, but it’s always agonizing, like the moments when a first punch is thrown but hasn’t yet connected. One guy with a beard is preparing to step out of his seat, opening his mouth to call my name. I know he means me no harm, but once he outs me, the whole train will be on me. Thirty seconds till all hell breaks loose.

I grab Louis’ arm and yank.

“Oww!”

I have the door between subway cars open and we’re pushing into the next car.

“What are you doing?” he says, flailing behind me

I’m not listening. I’m pulling him into another car then another until the train slows into a station and then I’m tugging him out of the train, onto the platform, up the stairs, taking them two at a time, some part of my brain vaguely warning me that I’m being too rough but the other part not giving a shit. Once up on the street, I pull him along for a few blocks until I’m sure no one is following us. Then I stop.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” he yells.

I feel a bolt of guilt shoot through me. But I throw the bolt right back at him.

“Well, what about you? Are you trying to get me attacked by a mob?”

I look down and realize that I’m still holding his hand. Louis looks, too. I let go.

“What mob, Harry?” he asks softly.

He’s talking to me like I’m a crazy person now. Just like Paul talks to me when I have one of my panic attacks. But at least Paul would never accuse me of fantasizing a fan attack. He’s seen it happen too many times.

“I got recognized down there,” I mutter, walking away from him.

Louis hesitates for a second, then skitters to catch up. “Nobody knew it was you.”

His ignorance—the luxury of that ignorance!

“The whole car knew it was me.”

“What are you talking about, Harry?”

“What am I talking about? I’m talking about having photographers camped out in front of my house. I’m talking about not having gone record shopping in almost two years. I’m talking about not being able to take a walk without feeling like a deer on the opening day of hunting season. I’m talking about every time I have a cold, it showing up in a tabloid as a coke habit.”

I look at him there in the shadows of the shut-down city, his hair falling onto his face, and I can see him trying to figure out if I’ve lost it. And I have to fight the urge to take him by the shoulders and slam him against a shuttered building until we feel the vibrations ringing through both of us. Because I suddenly want to hear his bones rattle. I want to feel the softness of his flesh give, to hear him gasp as my hip bone jams into him. I want to yank his head back until his neck is exposed. I want to rip my hands through his hair until his breath is labored. I want to make him cry and then lick up the tears. And then I want to take my mouth to his, to devour him alive, to transmit all the things he can’t understand.

“This is bullshit! Where the hell are you taking me anyway?” The adrenaline thrumming through me turns my voice into a growl.

Louis looks taken aback. “I told you. I’m taking you to my secret New York haunts.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little over secrets. Do you mind telling me where we’re going. Is that too much to fucking ask?”

“Christ, Harry, when did you become such a . . .”

Egomaniac? Asshole? Narcissist? I could fill in the blank with a million words. They’ve all been said before.

“. . . guy?” Louis finishes.

For a second, I almost laugh. Guy? That’s the best he’s got? It reminds me of the story my parents tell about me, how when I was a little kid and would get angry, I’d get so worked up and then curse them out by going “You, you, you . . . piston!” like it was the worst thing ever.

But then I remember something else, an old conversation Louis and I had late one night. He and Hannah had this habit of categorizing everything into diametric categories, and Louis was always announcing a new one. One day he told me that they’d decided that my gender was divvied into two neat piles—Men and Guys. Basically, all the saints of the world: Men. The jerks, the players, the wet T-shirt contest aficionados? They were Guys. Back then, I was a Man.

So I’m a Guy now? A Guy! I allow my hurt to show for half a second. Louis’ looking at me with confusion, but not remembering a thing.

Whoever said that the past isn’t dead had it backward. It’s the future that’s already dead, already played out. This whole night has been a mistake. It’s not going to let me rewind. Or unmake the mistakes I’ve made. Or the promises I’ve made. Or have him back. Or have me back.

Something’s changed in Louis’ face. Some type of recognition has clicked on. Because he’s explaining himself, how he called me a guy because guys always need to know the plan, the directions, and how he’s taking me on the Staten Island Ferry, which isn’t really a secret but it’s something few Manhattanites ever do, which is a shame because there’s this amazing view of the Statue of Liberty and on top of that, the ferry is free and nothing in New York is free, but if I’m worried about crowds we can forget it, but we can also just check it out and if it’s not empty—and he’s pretty sure it will be this time of night—we can get right back off before it leaves.

And I have no idea if he remembered that conversation about the Man/Guy distinction or not, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. Because he’s right. I am a Guy now. And I can peg the precise night I turned into one.


	13. THIRTEEN

The groupies started showing up right away. Or maybe they’d always been there and I just hadn’t noticed. But as soon as we started touring, they were buzzing about like hummingbirds dipping their beaks into spring flowers.

One of the first things we did after we signed with the label was hire Paul to manage us. Stockholm Syndrome was due to come out in September, and the label planned a modest tour in the late fall, but Paul had different ideas.

“You guys need to get your sea legs back,” Paul said when we finished mixing the album. “You need to get back on the road.”

So right as the album came out, Paul booked us a series of ten tour dates up and down the England, in clubs we’d played in before, to reconnect with our fan base—or to remind them that we still existed—and to get comfortable playing in front of an audience again.

The label rented us a nice Econoline van, tricked out with a bed in the back, and a trailer to haul our gear, but other than that when we set out, it didn’t feel that different from the shows we’d always played.

It was completely different.

For one, right away and for whatever reason, “18” was breaking out as a hit single. Even over the course of the two-week tour, its momentum was building and as that happened, you could feel it in every consecutive show we played. They went from well-attended to packed to sold-out to lines around the corner to fire marshals showing up. All in a matter of two weeks.

And the energy. It was like a live wire, like everyone at the shows knew we were right there on the verge and they wanted to be a part of it, a part of our history. It was like we were all in on this secret together. Maybe that’s why these were the best, most frenetic, rocking shows we’d ever played—tons of stage diving and people shouting along to the songs, even though nobody had heard any of our new stuff before. And I felt pretty good, pretty vindicated because even though it was just a matter of pure luck that things had gone this way, I hadn’t blown it for the band after all.

The groupies just seemed part of this wave of energy, this growing swell of fandom. At first, I didn’t even think of them as groupies because a lot of the girls I’d known vaguely from the scene. Except whereas before they’d been friendly, now they were brazen in their flirting. After one of our first shows in London, this hipster bloke named Jezoff who I’d known for a few years came backstage. He had glossy black hair and wiry arms covered in a daisy chain of tattoos. He gave me a huge hug and then a kiss on the mouth. He hung by my side all night long, his hand resting on the small of my back.

At that point, I’d been out of commission for well over a year. Louis and I, well, he’d been in the hospital, then in rehab, and even if he hadn’t been covered in stitches, plaster, and pressure bandages, there was no way. All those fantasies about sexy hospital sponge baths are a joke; there is no place less of a turn-on than a hospital. The smell alone is one of putrefaction—the opposite of desire.

When he’d come home, it had been to a downstairs room that had been his gran’s sewing room, which we’d turned into Louis’ bedroom. I’d slept on a nearby couch in the living room. There were spare rooms on the second floor, but Louis, who was still walking with a cane, couldn’t handle the stairs at first, and I hadn’t wanted to be even that far away.

Even though I was spending every night at Louis’, I’d never officially moved out of the House of Rock, and one night, a few months after Louis had come back to his grandparents’, he’d suggested we go there. After dinner with Liam and Sophie, Louis had tugged me up to my room. The minute the door clicked shut behind us, he’d pounced on me, kissing me with his mouth wide open, like he was trying to swallow me whole. I’d been taken aback at first, freaked out by this sudden ardor, worried that it was going to hurt him, and also, not really wanting to look at the stubbly red scar on his thigh where the skin had been taken for his graft or to bang against the snakeskin-like scar on his other leg, even though he kept that one covered with a pressure bandage.

But as he’d kissed me, my body had begun waking up to him, and with it, my mind had gone, too. We’d laid down on my futon. But then, right as things had gotten going, he’d started crying. I couldn’t tell at first because the little sobs had sounded just the same as the little moans he’d been giving off moments before. But soon, they’d grown in intensity, something awful and animal coming from deep within him. I’d asked if I’d hurt him, but he’d said that wasn’t it and asked me to leave the room. When he’d come out fully dressed, he’d asked to go home.

He’d tried to start things up with me once more after that. A summer night a few weeks before he’d left for Oxford. His grandparents had gone away to visit his aunt Diane, so we’d had the house to ourselves for the night, and Louis had suggested we sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms since by then the stairs were no longer a problem for him. It had been hot. We’d opened the windows and kicked off the antique quilt and just gotten under the sheet. I remember feeling all self-conscious, sharing a bed with him after all that time. So I’d grabbed a book for myself and propped up a row of pillows for Louis to bolster his leg against, like he liked to at night.

“I’m not ready to sleep,” he’d said, running a finger down my bare arm.

He’d leaned in to kiss me. Not the usual dry peck on the lips but a deep, rich, exploring kiss. I’d started to kiss him back. But then I’d remembered that night at the House of Rock, the sound of his animal keening, the look of fear in his eyes when he’d come out of the bedroom. No way was I sending him down that wormhole again. No way was I going down that wormhole again.

That night in London, though, with Jezoff’s hand playing on the small of my back, I was raring to go. I spent the night with him at his apartment, and he came with me the next morning to have breakfast with the band before we took off for our next stop. “Call me next time you’re in town,” he whispered in my ear as we parted ways.

“Back on the horse, my man,” Niall said, high-fiving me as we piloted the van south.

“Yeah, congratulations,” Liam said, a little sadly. “Just don’t rub it in.” Sophia had recently finished law school and was working for a human rights organization. No more dropping everything to be Liam’s plus-one on tours anymore.

“Just because you and Zayn are all tied down, don’t come sobbing to us,” Niall said. “Tour time is playtime, right, Wild Styles?”

“Wild Styles?” Liam asked. “Is that how it’s gonna be?”

“No,” I said.

“Hey, if the name fits . . .” Niall said. “Good thing I hit Fred Meyer for the economy box of condoms before we left.”

In L.A., there was another guy waiting. And in London, another. But none of it felt skeevy. Jezoff, the guy in L.A. was an old friend, and Nick, the one in London, was a radio Dj—smart and sexy and older. Nobody had any illusions that these flings were leading to grand romance.

It wasn’t until our second-to-last gig that I met a guy whose name I never did catch. I noticed him from the stage. He locked eyes on me the entire set and wouldn’t stop staring. It was weirding me out but also building me up. I mean he was practically undressing me with his eyes. You couldn’t help but feel powerful and turned on, and it felt good to be so obviously wanted again.

Our label was throwing us a CD-release party after the show, invitation only. I didn’t expect to see him there. But after a few hours, there he was, striding up to me in an outfit that was half punk, half supermodel: skin tight jeans and plaid shirt with just few buttons buttoned, it seemed like if he would walk too fast it would just fall right then and there.

He marched right up to me and announced in a not-too-quiet voice: “I’ve come all the way from America to fuck you.” And with that, he grabbed my hand and led me out the door and to his hotel room.

The next morning was awkward like none of the morning afters had been. I did a walk of shame to the bathroom, quickly dressed and tried to slip out, but he was right there, packed and ready to go. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Coming with you?” he said, as though it was obvious.

“Coming with me where?”

“To Manchester, love.”

Manchester was our last show and a sort of homecoming as we’d all be basing there now. Not in a communal House of Rock anymore. Liam and Sophia were getting their own place. Zayn was moving in with his girlfriend. And Niall and I were renting a house together. But we were all still in the same area, within walking distance to one another and the rehearsal space we now rented.

“We’re in a van. Not a tour bus,” I told him, looking down at my Converse. “And Manchester’s the last show, a kind of friends-and-family thing. You shouldn’t come.” And you are not my love.

He frowned and I’d slunk out the door, thinking that was the last of it. But when I showed up to sound check in Manchester, he was there, waiting for me. I told him to leave, not very nicely. It was along the lines of: There’s a name for this and it’s called stalking. I was a dick, I know, but I was tired. I’d asked him not to come. And he was freaking me out in a big way. Not just he. Four guys in two weeks was doing my head in. I needed to be alone.

“Piss off, Harry. You’re not even a bloody rock star yet, so stop acting like such a self-important wanker. And you weren’t even that good.” This he shouted in front of everyone.

So I had the roadies throw him out. He left screaming insults about me, my sexual prowess, my ego.

“Wild Styles, indeed,” Liam said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like the opposite of a wild man, actually wanting to sneak into a room and hide. I didn’t know it yet, but once the real tour started—the one our label sent us on after the album went haywire, a five-month slog of sold-out shows and groupies galore—all I’d wanted to do was hide. Given my isolationist tendencies, you’d think I’d have learned to stay away from the freebie affection on such constant offer. But after shows, I craved connection. I craved skin—the taste of another man’s sweat. If it couldn’t be his, well, then anyone’s would do . . . for a few hours. But I’d learned one lesson—no more overnight guests.

So, that night in London may have been the first time I became a guy. But it wasn’t the last.


	14. FOURTEEN

Taste on my tongue

I don’t wanna wash away the night before

In the heat where you lay

I could stay right here and burn in it all day

 “NO CONTROL”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 8

I go with Louis to the ferry anyway. Because what else am I going to do? Throw a tantrum because he hasn’t kept an up-to-date catalog of every conversation we’ve ever had. It’s called moving on.

And he’s right about the ferry being dead. At four thirty in the morning, not a lot of demand for Staten Island. There are maybe a dozen people sprawled out in the downstairs deck. One trio of late-night stragglers is sacked out on a bench, rehashing the evening, but as we pass them, one of the girls lifts her head and stares at me. Then she asks her friend, “Dude, is that Harry Styles?”

The friend laughs. “Yeah. And next to him is Joe Jonas. Why the hell would Harry Styles be on the Staten Island Ferry?”

I’m asking myself the same question.

But this is apparently one of Louis’ things, and this is his farewell-to-New-York-even-though-I’m-not-actually-leaving tour. So I follow him upstairs to the bow of the boat near the railing.

As we pull away from New York, the skyline recedes behind us and the Hudson River opens up to one side, the harbor to the other. It’s peaceful out here on the water, quiet except for a pair of hopeful seagulls following in our wake, squawking for food, I guess, or maybe just some company in the night. I start to relax in spite of myself.

And after a few minutes, we’re close to the Statue of Liberty. She’s all spotlit in the night, and her torch is also illuminated, like there’s really a flame in there, welcoming the huddled masses. Yo, lady, here I am.

I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty. Too many crowds. Paul once invited me on a private helicopter tour, but I don’t do choppers. But now that she’s right here, I can see why this is on Louis’ list. In pictures, the statue always looks kind of grim, determined, But up close, she’s softer. She has a look on her face, like she knows something you don’t.

“You’re smiling,” Louis says to me.

And I realize I am. Maybe it’s being granted a special pass to do something I thought was off-limits. Or maybe the statue’s look is contagious.

“It’s nice,” Louis says. “I haven’t seen it in a while.”

“It’s funny,” I reply, “because I was just thinking about her.” I gesture toward the statue. “It’s like she has some kind of secret. The secret to life.”

Louis looks up. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

I blow air out my lips. “I could really use that secret.”

Louis tilts his head out over the railing. “Yeah? So ask her for it.”

“Ask her?”

“She’s right there. No one’s here. No tourists crawling around her feet like little ants. Ask her for her secret.”

“I’m not going to ask her.”

“You want me to do it? I will, but it’s your question, so I think you should do the honors.”

“You make a habit of talking to statues?”

“Yes. And pigeons. Now, are you going to ask?”

I look at Louis. He’s got his arms crossed across his chest, a little impatient. I turn back to the railing. “Um. Statue? Oh, Statue of Liberty,” I call out quietly. No one is around, but this is still really embarrassing.

“Louder,” Louis prods.

What the hell. “Hey, excuse me,” I call out, “what’s your secret?”

We both cock our ears out over the water, as though we expect an answer to come racing back.

“What did she say?” Louis asks.

“Liberty.”

“Liberty,” Louis repeats, nodding in agreement. “No, wait, I think there’s more. Hang on.” He leans out over the railing, widening his eyes. “Hmm. Hmm. Aha.” He turns to me. “Apparently, she isn’t wearing any underwear under her robes, and with the bay breeze, it provides a certain frisson.”

“Lady Liberty’s going commando,” I say. “That is so French!”

Louis cracks up at that. “Do you think she ever flashes the tourists?”

“No way! Why do you think she has that private little look on her face? All those red-state puritans coming by the boatload, never once suspecting that Old Libs hasn’t got panties on. She’s probably sporting a Brazilian.”

“Okay, I need to lose that visual,” Louis groans. “And might I remind you that we’re from a red state—sort of.”

“Doncaster’s a divided city,” I reply. “Lots of hippies there as well”.

“Speaking of hippies, and going commando . . .”

“Oh, no. Now that’s a visual I really don’t need.”

“Mammary Liberation Day!” Louis crows, referring to some sixties holdover in our town. Once a year a bunch of women spend the day topless to protest the inequity that it’s legal for men to go shirtless, but not women. They do it in the summer, but Doncaster being Doncaster, half the time, it’s still freezing, so there was a lot of aging puckered flesh. Louis’ mom had always threatened to march; his dad had always bribed her with a dinner out at a fancy restaurant not to.

“Keep Your Class B Misdemeanor off My B Cups,” Louis says, quoting one of the movement’s more ridiculous slogans between gasps of laughter. “That makes no sense. If you’re baring your boobs, why a bra?”

“Sense? It was some stoner hippie idea. And you’re looking for logic?”

“Mammary Liberation Day,” Louis says, wiping away the tears. “Good old Doncaster! That was a lifetime ago.”

And it was. So the remark shouldn’t feel like a slap. But it does. “How come you never went back?” I ask. It’s not really Doncaster’s abandonment I want explained, but it seems safer to hide under the big green blanket of our state.

“Why should I?” Louis asks, keeping his gaze steady over the water.

“I don’t know. The people there.”

“The people there can come here.”

“To visit them. Your family. At the . . .” Oh, shit, what am I saying?

“You mean the graves?”

I just nod.

“Actually, they’re the reason I don’t go back.”

I nod my head. “Too painful.”

Louis laughs. A real and genuine laugh, a sound about as expected as a car alarm in a rain forest. “No, it’s not like that at all.” He shakes his head. “Do you honestly think that where you’re buried has any bearing on where your spirit lives?”

Where your spirit lives?

“Do you want to know where my family’s spirits live?”

I suddenly feel like I’m talking to a spirit. The ghost of rational Louis.

“They’re here,” he says, tapping his chest. “And here,” he says, touching his temple. “I hear them all the time.”

I have no idea what to say. Were we not just making fun of all the New Agey hippie types in our town two minutes ago?

But Louis’ not kidding anymore. He frowns deeply, swivels away. “Never mind.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“No, I get it. I sound like a Rainbow Warrior. A freak. A Looney Tune.”

“Actually, you sound like your gran.”

He stares at me. “If I tell you, you’ll call the guys with the straitjackets.”

“I left my phone at the hotel.”

“Right.”

“Also, we’re on a boat.”

“Good point.”

“And if by chance they do show up, I’ll just offer myself up. So, what, do they, like, haunt you?”

He takes a deep breath and his shoulders slump as if he’s setting down a heavy load. He beckons me over to one of the empty benches. I sit down next to him.

“‘Haunt’ is not the right word for it. Haunt makes it sound bad, unwelcome. But I do hear them. All the time.”

“Oh.”

“Not just hear their voices, like the memory of them,” he goes on. “I can hear them talk to me. Like now. In real time. About my life.”

I must give him a weird look, because he blushes. “I know. I hear dead people. But it’s not like that. Like remember that crazy homeless woman who used to wander around the college campus claiming she heard voices broadcast to her shopping cart?” I nod. Louis stops for a minute.

“At least I don’t think it’s like that,” he says. “Maybe it is. Maybe I am nuts and just don’t think I am because crazy people never think they’re crazy, right? But I really do hear them. Whether it’s some kind of angel force like Gran believes, and they’re up in some heaven on a direct line to me, or whether it’s just the them I’ve stored inside me, I don’t know. And I don’t know if it even matters. What matters is that they’re with me. All the time. And I know I sound like a crazy person, mumbling to myself sometimes, but I’m just talking to Mom about what skirt to buy or to Dad about a recital I’m nervous about or to Sarah about a movie I’ve seen.

“And I can hear them answer me. Like they’re right there in the room with me. Like they never really went away. And here’s what’s really weird: I couldn’t hear them back in Doncaster. After the accident, it was like their voices were receding. I thought I was going to totally lose the ability to remember what they even sounded like. But once I got away, I could hear them all the time. That’s why I don’t want to go back. Well, one of the reasons. I’m scared I’ll lose the connection, so to speak.”

“Can you hear them now?”

He pauses, listens, nods.

“What are they saying?”

“They’re saying it’s so good to see you, Harry.”

I know he’s sort of joking, but the thought that they can see me, keep tabs on me, know what I’ve done these last three years, it makes me actually shudder in the warm night.

Louis sees me shudder, looks down. “I know, it’s crazy. It’s why I’ve never told anyone this. Not Ernesto. Not even Hannah.”

No, I want to tell him. You got it wrong. It’s not crazy at all. I think of all the voices that clatter around in my head, voices that I’m pretty sure are just some older, or younger, or just better versions of me. There have been times—when things have been really bleak—that I’ve tried to summon him, to have him answer me back, but it never works. I just get me. If I want his voice, I have to rely on memories. At least I have plenty of those.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have had his company in my head—the comfort that would’ve brought. To know that he’s had them with him all this time, it makes me glad. It also makes me understand why, of the two of us, he seems like the sane one.


	15. FIFTEEN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for not updating this for so long, so here you go, another day another chapter! :))

I’m pretty sure that when babies are born in Doncaster, they leave the hospital with birth certificates—and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour’s notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we’d drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we’d even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock ’n’ roll house.

I don’t know if it’s because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Doncaster camped.

Everyone, that was, except for Louis Tomlinson.

“I sleep in beds,” was what Louis told me the first time I invited him to go camping for a weekend. To which I’d offered to bring one of those blow-up air mattresses, but he’d still refused. Lauren had overheard me trying to persuade Louis and had laughed.

“Good luck with that, Harry,” she’d said. “Brandon and I took Louis camping when he was a baby. We planned to spend a week at the coast, but he screamed for two days straight and we had to come home. He’s allergic to camping.”

“It’s true,” Louis had said.

“I’ll go,” Sarah had offered. “I only ever get to go camp in the backyard.”

“Gramps takes you out every month,” Brandon had replied. “And I take you. You just don’t get to go camping with all of us as a family.” He’d given Louis a look. He’d just rolled his eyes back at him.

So it shocked me when Louis agreed to go camping. It was the summer before his senior year of high school and my first year of college, and we’d hardly seen each other. Things with the band had really started heating up, so I’d been touring for a lot of that summer, and Louis had been away at his band camp and then visiting relatives. He must’ve been really missing me. It was the only explanation I could imagine for his relenting.

I knew better than to rely on the punk-rock mode of camping. So I borrowed a tent. And one of those foam things to sleep on. And I packed a cooler full of food. I wanted to make everything okay, though to be honest, I wasn’t really clear on why Louis was so averse to camping in the first place—he was not a prissy guy, not by a long shot; this was a guy who liked to play midnight football—so I had no idea if the creature comforts would help.

When I went to pick him up, his whole family came down to see us off, like we were heading off on a crosscountry road trip instead of a twenty-four-hour jaunt. Lauren waved me over.

“What’d you pack, for food?” she asked.

“Sandwiches. Fruit. For tonight, hamburgers, baked beans, s’mores. I’m trying for the authentic camping experience.”

Lauren nodded, all serious. “Good, though you might want to feed him the s’mores first if he gets cranky. Also, I packed you some provisions.” She handed me a half-gallon Ziploc. “In case of emergency, break glass.”

“What’s all this stuff?”

“Now and Laters. Starburst. Pixie Stix. If he gets too bitchy, just feed him this crap. As long as the sugar high is in effect, you and the wildlife should be safe.”

“Well, thanks.”

Lauren shook her head “You’re a braver man than I. Good luck.”

“Yeah, you’ll need it,” Brandon replied. Then he and Lauren locked eyes for a second and started cracking up.

There were plenty of great camping spots within an hour’s drive, but I wanted to take us somewhere a little more special, so I wound us deep into the hills, to this place up an old logging road I’d been to a lot as a kid. When I pulled off the road, onto a dirt path, Louis asked: “Where’s the campground?”

“Campgrounds are for tourists. We free camp.”

“Free camp?” His voice rose in alarm.

“Relax, Louis. My dad used to log around here. I know these roads. And if you’re worried about showers and stuff—”

“I don’t care about the showers.”

“Good, because we have our own private pool.” I turned off my car and showed Louis the spot. It was right alongside the river, where a small inlet of water pooled calm and crystal clear. The view in all directions was unfettered, nothing but pine trees and hills, like a giant postcard advertising DONCASTER!

“It’s pretty,” Louis admitted, grudgingly.

“Wait till you see the view from the top of the ridge. You up for a walk?”

Louis nodded. I grabbed some sandwiches and waters and two packs of watermelon Now and Laters and we traipsed up the trail, hung out for a while, read our books under a tree. By the time we got back down, it was twilight.

“I’d better get the tent up,” I said.

“You need some help?”

“No. You’re the guest. You relax. Read your book or something.”

“If you say so.”

I dumped the borrowed tent pieces on the ground and started to hook up the poles. Except the tent was one of those newfangled ones, where all the poles are in one giant puzzle piece, not like the simple pup tents I’d grown up assembling. After half an hour, I was still struggling with it. The sun was dipping behind the hills, and Louis had put down his book. He was watching me, a bemused little smile on his face.

“Enjoying this?” I asked, perspiring in the evening chill.

“Definitely. Had I known this was what it would be like, I would’ve agreed to come ages ago.”

“I’m glad you find it so amusing.”

“Oh, I do. But are you sure you wouldn’t like some help? You’ll need me to hold a flashlight if this takes much longer.”

I sighed. Held my hands up in surrender. “I’m being bested by a piece of sporting goods.”

“Does your opponent have instructions?”

“It probably did at some point.”

He shook his head, stood up, grabbed the top of the tent. “Okay, you take this end. I’ll do this end. I think the long part loops over the top here.”

Ten minutes later we had the tent set up and staked down. I collected some rocks and some kindling for a fire pit and got a campfire going with the firewood I’d brought. I cooked us burgers in a pan over the fire and baked beans directly in the can.

“I’m impressed,” Louis said.

“So you like camping?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said, but he was smiling.

It was only later, after we’d had dinner and s’mores and washed our dishes in the moonlit river and I’d played some guitar around the campfire as Louis sipped tea and chowed through a pack of Starburst, that I finally understood Louis’ issue with camping.

It was maybe ten o’clock, but in camping time, that’s like two in the morning. We got into our tent, snuggled into the double sleeping bag. I pulled Louis to me. “Wanna know the best part about camping?”

I felt his whole body tense up—but not in the good way. “What was that?” he whispered.

“What was what?”

“I heard something,” he said.

“It was probably just an animal,” I said.

He flicked on the flashlight. “How do you know that?”

I took the flashlight and shined it on him. His eyes were huge. “You’re scared?”

He looked down and—barely—nodded his head.

“The only thing you need to worry about out here is bears and they’re only interested in the food, which is why we put it all away in the car,” I reassured him.

“I’m not scared of bears,” Louis said disdainfully.

“Then what is it?”

“I, I just feel like such a sitting target out here.”

“Sitting target for who?”

“I don’t know, people with guns. All those hunters.”

“That’s ridiculous. Half of Doncaster hunts. My whole family hunts. They hunt animals, not campers.”

“I know,” he said in a small voice. “It’s not really that, either. I just feel . . . defenseless. It’s just, I don’t know, the world feels so big when you’re out in the wide open. It’s like you don’t have a place in it when you don’t have a home.”

“Your place is right here,” I whispered, laying him down and hugging him close.

He snuggled into me. “I know.” He sighed. “What a freak! The grandson of a retired Forest Service biologist who’s scared of camping.”

“That’s just the half of it. You’re a classical pianist whose parents are old punk rockers. You’re a total freak. But you’re my freak.”

We lay there in silence for a while. Louis clicked off the flashlight and scooted closer to me. “Did you hunt as a kid?” he whispered. “I’ve never heard you mention it.”

“I used to go out with my dad,” I murmured back. Even though we were the only people within miles, something about the night demanded we speak in hushed tones. “He always said when I was twelve I’d get a rifle for my birthday and he’d teach me to shoot. But when I was maybe nine, I went out with some older cousins and one of them loaned me his rifle. And it must’ve been beginner’s luck or something because I shot a rabbit. My cousins were all going crazy. Rabbits are small and quick and hard for even seasoned hunters to kill, and I’d hit one on my first try. They went to get it so we could bring it back to show everyone and maybe stuff it for a trophy. But when I saw it all bloody, I just started crying. Then I started screaming that we had to take it to a vet, but of course it was dead. I wouldn’t let them bring it back. I made them bury it in the forest. When my dad heard, he told me that the point of hunting was to take some sustenance from the animal, whether we eat it or skin it or something, otherwise it was a waste of a life. But I think he knew I wasn’t cut out for it because when I turned twelve, I didn’t get a rifle; I got a guitar.”

“You never told me that before,” Louis said.

“Guess I didn’t want to blow my punk-rock credibility.”

“I would think that would cement it,” he said.

“Nah. But I’m emocore all the way, so it works.”

A warm silence hung in the tent. Outside, I could hear the low hoot of an owl echo in the night. Louis nudged me in the ribs. “You’re such a softy!”

“This from the guy who’s scared of camping!”

He chuckled. I pulled him closer to me, wanting to eradicate any distance between our bodies. I pushed his hair off his neck and nuzzled my face there. “Now you owe me an embarrassing story from your childhood,” I murmured into his ear.

“All my embarrassing stories are still happening,” he replied.

“There must be one I don’t know.”

He was silent for a while. Then he said: “Butterflies.”

“Butterflies? ”

“I was terrified of butterflies.”

“What is it with you and nature?”

He shook with silent laughter. “I know,” he said. “And can there be a less-threatening creature than a butterfly? They only live, like, two weeks. But I used to freak any time I saw one. My parents did everything they could to desensitize me: bought me books on butterflies, clothes with butterflies, put up butterfly posters in my room. But nothing worked.”

“Were you like attacked by a gang of monarchs?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Gran had this theory behind my phobia. She said it was because one day I was going to have to go through a metamorphosis like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly and that scared me, so butterflies scared me.”

“That sounds like your gran. How’d you get over your fear?”

“I don’t know. I just decided not to be scared of them anymore and then one day I wasn’t.”

“Fake it till you make it.”

“Something like that.”

“You could try that with camping.”

“Do I have to?”

“Nah, but I’m glad you came.”

He’d turned to face me. It was almost pitch-black in the tent but I could see his blue eyes shining. “Me too. But do we have to go to sleep? Can we just stay like this for a while?”

“All night long if you want. We’ll tell our secrets to the dark.”

“Okay.”

“So let’s hear another one of your irrational fears.”

Louis grasped me by the arms and pulled himself in to my chest, like he was burrowing his body into mine. “I’m scared of losing you,” he said in the faintest of voices.

I pushed him away so I could see his face and kissed the top of his forehead. “I said ‘irrational’ fears. Because that’s not gonna happen.”

“It still scares me,” he murmured. But then he went on to list other random things that freaked him out and I did the same, and we kept whispering to each other, telling stories from our childhoods, deep, deep into the night until finally Louis forgot to be scared and fell asleep.

The weather turned cool a few weeks later, and that winter was when Louis had his accident. So that actually turned out to be the last time I went camping. But even if it weren’t, I still think it would be the best trip of my life. Whenever I remember it, I just picture our tent, a little ship glowing in the night, the sounds of Louis’ and my whispers escaping like musical notes, floating out on a moonlit sea.


	16. SIXTEEN

I think I’m gonna lose my mind

Something deep inside me, I can’t give up

I think I’m gonna lose my mind

I roll and I roll ‘till I’m out of luck, yeah

I roll and I roll ‘till I’m out of luck

 “FIREPROOF”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 9

Fingers of light are starting to pry open the night sky. Soon the sun will rise and a new day will inarguably begin. A day in which I’m leaving for London. And Louis for Tokyo. I feel the countdown of the clock ticking like a time bomb.

We’re on the Brooklyn Bridge now, and though Louis hasn’t said so specifically, I feel like this must be the last stop. I mean, we’re leaving Manhattan—and not a round-trip like our cruise out to Staten Island and back was. And also, Louis has decided, I guess, that since he’s pulled some confessionals, it’s my turn. About halfway across the bridge, he stops suddenly and turns to me.

“So what’s up with you and the band?” he asks.

There’s a warm wind blowing, but I suddenly feel cold. “What do you mean, ‘what’s up?’”

Louis shrugs. “Something’s up. I can tell. You’ve hardly talked about them all night. You guys used to be inseparable, and now you don’t even live in the same state. And why didn’t you go to London together?”

“I told you, logistics.”

“What was so important that they couldn’t have waited one night for you?”

“I had to, to do some stuff. Go into the studio and lay down a few guitar tracks.”

Louis eyes me skeptically. “But you’re on tour for a new album. Why are you even recording?”

“A promo version of one of our singles. More of this,” I say, frowning as I rub my fingers together in a money-money motion.

“But wouldn’t you be recording together?”

I shake my head. “It doesn’t really work like that anymore. And besides, I had to do an interview with Shuffle.”

“An interview? Not with the band? Just with you? That’s what I don’t get.”

I think back to the day before. To Vanessa LeGrande. And out of the blue, I’m recalling the lyrics to “Stockholm Syndrome,” and wondering if maybe discussing this with Louis Tomlinson above the dark waters of the East River isn’t such a hot idea. At least it isn’t Friday the thirteenth anymore.

“Yeah. That’s kinda how it works these days, too,” I say.

“Why do they only want just you? What do they want to know about?”

I really don’t want to talk about this. But Louis’ like a bloodhound, tracking a scent, and I know him well enough to know that I can either throw him a piece of bloody meat, or let him sniff his way to the real pile of stinking corpses. I go for the diversion.

“Actually, that part’s kinda interesting. The reporter, she asked about you.”

“What?” Louis swivels around to face me.

“She was interviewing me and asked about you. About us. About high school.” The look of shock on Louis’ face, I savor it. I think about what he said earlier, about his life in Doncaster being a lifetime ago. Well, maybe not such a lifetime ago! “That’s the first time that’s happened. Kinda strange coincidence, all things considered.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences anymore.”

“I didn’t tell her anything, but she’d gotten a hold of the old Cougar yearbook. The one with our picture—Groovy and the Geek.”

Louis shakes his head. “Yeah, I so loved that nick-name.”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything. And for good measure, I smashed her recorder. Destroyed all evidence.”

“Not all the evidence.” He stares at me. “The Cougar lives on. I’m sure Hannah will be delighted to know her early work may turn up in a national magazine.” He shakes his head and chuckles. “Once Hannah gets you in her shutter, you’re stuck forever. So it was pointless to destroy that reporter’s recorder.”

“I know. I just sort of lost it. She was this very provocative person, and she was trying to get a rise out of me with all these insults-disguised-as-compliments.”

Louis nods knowingly. “I get that, too. It’s the worst! ‘I was fascinated by the Shostakovich you played tonight. So much more subdued than the Bach,’ he says in a snooty voice. ‘Translation: The Shostakovich sucked.’”

I can’t imagine the Shostakovich ever sucking, but I won’t deny us this common ground.

“So what did she want to know about me?”

“She had plans to do this big exposé, I guess, on what makes White Eskimo tick. And she went digging around our hometown and talked to people we went to high school with. And they told her about us . . . about the . . . about what we were. And about you and what happened . . .” I trail off. I look down at the river, at a passing barge, which, judging by its smell, is carrying garbage.

“And what really happened?” Louis asks.

I’m not sure if this is a rhetorical question, so I force my own voice into a jokey drawl. “Yeah, that’s what I’m still trying to figure out.”

It occurs to me that this is maybe the most honest thing I’ve said all night, but the way I’ve said it transforms it into a lie.

“You know, my manager warned me that the accident might get a lot of attention as my profile went up, but I didn’t think that the connection to you would be an issue. I mean, I did in the beginning. I sort of waited for someone to look me up—ghosts of boyfriends past—but I guess I wasn’t interesting enough compared to your other, um, attachments.”

He thinks that’s why none of the hacks have pestered him, because he’s not as interesting as Kendall, who I guess he does know about. If only he knew how the band’s inner circle has bent over backward to keep his name out of things, to not touch the bruise that blooms at the mere mention of him. That right at this very moment there are riders in interview contracts that dictate whole swaths of forbidden conversational topics that, though they don’t name him specifically, are all about obliterating him from the record. Protecting him. And me.

“I guess high school really is ancient history,” he concludes.

Ancient history? Have you really relegated us to the trash heap of the Dumb High-School Romance? And if that’s the case, why the hell can’t I do the same?

“Yeah, well you plus me, we’re like MTV plus Lifetime,” I say, with as much jauntiness as I can muster. “In other words, shark bait.”

He sighs. “Oh, well. I suppose even sharks have to eat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s just, I don’t particularly want my family history dragged through the public eye, but if that’s the price to be paid for doing what you love, I guess I’ll pay it.”

And we’re back to this. The notion that music can make it all worthwhile—I’d like to believe. I just don’t. I’m not even sure that I ever did. It isn’t the music that makes me want to wake up every day and take another breath. I turn away from him toward the dark water below.

“What if it’s not what you love?” I mumble, but my voice gets lost in the wind and the traffic. But at least I’ve said it out loud. I’ve done that much.

I need a cigarette. I lean against the railing and look uptown toward a trio of bridges. Louis comes to stand beside me as I’m fumbling to get my lighter to work.

“You should quit,” he says, touching me gently on the shoulder.

For a second, I think he means the band. That he heard what I said before and is telling me to quit White Eskimo, leave the whole music industry. I keep waiting for someone to advise me to quit the music business, but no one ever does. Then I remember how earlier tonight, he told me the same thing, right before he bummed a cigarette. “It’s not so easy,” I say.

“Bullshit,” Louis says with a self-righteousness that instantly recalls his mother, Lauren, who wore her certitude like a beat-up leather jacket and who had a mouth on her that could make a roadie blush. “Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.”

“Really? Was that how you quit me?”

And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for days, it’s out there.

“So,” he says, as if speaking to an audience under the bridge. “He finally says it.”

“Was I not supposed to? Am I just supposed to let this whole night go without talking about what you did?”

“No,” he says softly.

“So why? Why did you go? Was it because of the voices?”

He shakes his head. “It wasn’t the voices.”

“Then what? What was it?” I hear the desperation in my own voice now.

“It was lots of things. Like how you couldn’t be yourself around me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You stopped talking to me.”

“That’s absurd, Louis. I talked to you all the time!”

“You talked to me, but you didn’t. I could see you having these two-sided conversations. The things you wanted to say to me. And the words that actually came out.”

I think of all the dual conversations I have. With everyone. Is that when it started? “Well, you weren’t exactly easy to talk to,” I shoot back. “Anything I said was the wrong thing.”

He looks at me with a sad smile. “I know. It wasn’t just you. It was you plus me. It was us.”

I just shake my head. “It’s not true.”

“Yes it is. But don’t feel bad. Everyone walked on eggshells around me. But with you, it was painful that you couldn’t be real with me. I mean, you barely even touched me.”

As if to reinforce the point, he places two fingers on the inside of my wrist. Were smoke to rise and the imprints of his two fingers branded onto me, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. I have to pull away just to steady myself.

“You were healing,” is my pathetic reply. “And if I recall, when we did try, you freaked.”

“Once,” he says. “Once.”

“All I wanted was for you to be okay. All I wanted was to help you. I would’ve done anything.”

He drops his chin to his chest. “Yes, I know. You wanted to rescue me.”

“Damn, Louis. You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

He looks up at me. The sympathy is still in his eyes, but there’s something else now, too: a fierceness; it slices up my anger and reconstitutes it as dread.

“You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone,” he says. “I know you were trying to help, but it just felt, at the time, like you were pushing me away, keeping things from me for my own good and making me more of a victim. Ernesto says that people’s good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins.”

“Ernesto? What the hell does he know about it?”

Louis traces the gap between the wooden boardwalk planks with his toe. “A lot, actually. His parents were killed when he was eight. He was raised by his grandparents.”

I know what I’m supposed to feel is sympathy. But the rage just washes over me. “What, is there some club?” I ask, my voice starting to crack. “A grief club that I can’t join?”

I expect him to tell me no. Or that I’m a member. After all, I lost them, too. Except even back then, it had been different, like there’d been a barrier. That’s the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is. Because no matter how important they’d been to me, no matter how sorry people told me they were, Brandon and Lauren and Sarah weren’t my family, and suddenly that distinction had mattered.

Apparently, it still does. Because Louis stops and considers my question. “Maybe not a grief club. But a guilt club. From being left behind.”

Oh, don’t talk to me about guilt! My blood runs thick with it. On the bridge, now I feel tears coming. The only way to keep them at bay is to find the anger that’s sustained me and push back with it. “But you could’ve at least told me,” I say, my voice rising to a shout. “Instead of dropping me like a one-night stand, you could’ve had the decency to break up with me instead of leaving me wondering for three years. . . .”

“I didn’t plan it,” he says, his own pitch rising. “I didn’t get on that plane thinking we’d split up. You were everything to me. Even as it was happening, I didn’t believe it was happening. But it was. Just being here, being away, it was all so much easier in a way I didn’t anticipate. In a way I didn’t think my life could be anymore. It was a huge relief.”

I think of all the guys whose backs I couldn’t wait to see in retreat. How once their sound and smell and voices were gone, I felt my whole body exhale. A lot of the time Kendall falls into this category. That’s how my absence felt to Louis?

“I planned to tell you,” he continues, the words coming out in a breathless jumble now, “but at first I was so confused. I didn’t even know what was happening, only that I was feeling better without you and how could I explain that to you? And then time went by, you didn’t call me, when you didn’t pursue it, I just figured that you, you of all people, you understood. I knew I was being a chickenshit. But I thought . . .” Louis stumbles for a second then regains his composure. “I thought I was allowed that. And that you understood it. I mean you seemed to. You wrote: ‘Who's gonna be the last one to drive away, Forgetting every single promise we ever made.' I don’t know. When I heard ‘Spaces’ I just thought you did understand. That you were angry, but you knew. I had to choose me.”

“That’s your excuse for dropping me without a word? There’s cowardly, Louis. And then there’s cruel! Is that who you’ve become?”

“Maybe it was who I needed to be for a while,” he cries. “And I’m sorry. I know I should’ve contacted you. Should’ve explained. But you weren’t all that accessible.”

“Oh, bullshit, Louis. I’m inaccessible to most people. But you? Two phone calls and you could’ve tracked me down.”

“It didn’t feel that way,” he said. “You were this . . .” he trails off, miming an explosion, the same as Vanessa LeGrande had done earlier in the day. “Phenomenon. Not a person anymore.”

“That’s such a load of crap and you should know it. And besides, that was more than a year after you left. A year. A year in which I was curled up into a ball of misery at my parents’ house, Louis. Or did you forget that phone number, too?”

“No.” Louis’ voice is flat. “But I couldn’t call you at first.”

“Why?” I yell. “Why not?”

Louis faces me now. The wind is whipping his hair this way and that so he looks like some kind of mystical sorcer, beautiful, powerful, and scary at the same time. He shakes his head and starts to turn away.

Oh, no! We’ve come this far over the bridge. He can blow the damn thing up if he wants to. But not without telling me everything. I grab him, turn him to face me. “Why not? Tell me. You owe me this!”

He looks at me, square in the eye. Taking aim. And then he pulls the trigger. “Because I hated you.”

The wind, the noise, it all just goes quiet for a second, and I’m left with a dull ringing in my ear, like after a show, like after a heart monitor goes to flatline.

“Hated me? Why?”

“You made me stay.” He says it quietly, and it almost gets lost in the wind and the traffic and I’m not sure I heard him. But then he repeats it louder this time. “You made me stay!”

And there it is. A hollow blown through my heart, confirming what some part of me has always known.

He knows.

The electricity in the air has changed; it’s like you can smell the ions dancing. “I still wake up every single morning and for a second I forget that I don’t have my family anymore,” he tells me. “And then I remember. Do you know what that’s like? Over and over again. It would’ve been so much easier . . .” And suddenly his calm facade cracks and he begins to cry.

“Please,” I hold up my hands. “Please don’t . . .”

“No, you’re right. You have to let me say this, Harry! You have to hear it. It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you—you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow. And I can understand why you’re angry, but you can’t blame me. You can’t hate me for taking your word.”

Louis’ sobbing now. I’m wracked with shame because I brought him to this.

And suddenly, I get it. I understand why he summoned me to his at the theater, why he came after me once I left his dressing room. This is what the farewell tour is really all about—Louis completing the severance he began three years ago.

Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it’s the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it’s frozen shut. All of me is frozen shut. And about to shut down completely.

I stare down at the water. A minute ago it was calm and glassy but now it’s like the river is opening up, churning, a violent whirlpool. It’s that vortex, threatening to swallow me whole. I’m going to drown in it, with nobody, nobody in the murk with me.

I’ve blamed him for all of this, for leaving, for ruining me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it. I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.

I look at the river. It’s like the waves are fifty feet high, snapping at me now, trying to pull me over the bridge into the waters below.

“I can’t do this anymore!” I yell as the carnivorous waves come for me.

Again, I scream, “I can’t do this anymore!” I’m yelling to the waves and to Liam and Niall and Zayn and Paul, to our record executives and to Kendall and Vanessa and the paparazzi and the girls in the U Mich sweatshirts and the scenesters on the subway and everyone who wants a piece of me when there aren’t enough pieces to go around. But mostly I’m yelling it to myself.

“I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE!” I scream louder than I’ve ever screamed in my life, so loud my breath is knocking down trees in Manhattan, I’m sure of it. And as I battle with invisible waves and imaginary vortexes and demons that are all too real and of my own making, I actually feel something in my chest open, a feeling so intense it’s like my heart’s about to burst. And I just let it. I just let it out.

When I look up, the river is a river again. And my hands, which had been gripping the railing of the bridge so tight that my knuckles had gone white, have loosened.

Louis is walking away, walking toward the other end of the bridge. Without me.

I get it now.

I have to make good on my promise. To let him go. To really let him go. To let us both go.


	17. SEVENTEEN

I started playing in my first band, Infinity 89, when I was fourteen years old. Our first show was at a house party near the college campus. All three of us in the band—me on guitar, my friend Nate on bass, and his older brother Jonah on drums—sucked. None of us had been playing for long, and after the gig we found out that Jonah had bribed the host of the party to let us play. It’s a little-known fact that Harry Styles’ first foray into playing rock music in front of an audience might never have happened had Jonah Hamilton not pitched in for a keg.

The keg turned out to be the best thing about that show. We were so nervous that we turned the amps up too loud, creating a frenzy of feedback that made the neighbors complain, and then we overcompensated by playing so low that we couldn’t hear one another’s instruments.

What I could hear in the pauses between songs was the sound of the party: the din of beer bottles clinking, of mindless chatter, of people laughing, and, I swear, in the back room of the house, people watching American Idol. The point is, I could hear all this because our band was so crappy that no one bothered to acknowledge that we were playing. We weren’t worth cheering. We were too bad to even boo. We were simply ignored. When we finished playing, the party carried on as if we’d never gone on.

We got better. Never great, but better. And never good enough to play anything but house parties. Then Jonah went off to college, and Nate and I were left without a drummer, and that was the end of Infinity 89.

Thus began my brief stint as a lone singer-songwriter about town, playing in coffeehouses, mostly. Doing the café circuit was marginally better than the house parties. With just me and a guitar, I didn’t need to up the volume that much, and people in the audience were mostly respectful. But as I played, I was still distracted by the sounds of things other than the music: the hiss of the cappuccino maker, the intellectual college students’ hushed conversations about Important Things, the giggles of girls. After the show, the giggles grew louder as the guys came up to me to talk, to ask me about my inspiration, to offer me mix CDs they’d made, and sometimes to offer other things.

One guy was different. He had muscled arms and a fierce look in his eyes. The first time he spoke to me he said only: “You’re wasted.”

“Nope. Sober as a stone,” I replied.

“Not that kind of wasted,” he said, arching his eyebrow. “You’re wasted on acoustic. I saw you play before in that terrible band of yours, but you were really good, even for a child such as yourself.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“You’re welcome. I’m not here for flattery. I’m here for recruitment.”

“Sorry. I’m a pacifist.”

“Funny! I’m a dyke, one who likes to ask and tell, so I’m also ill-suited for the military. No, I’m putting together a band. I think you’re an outrageously talented guitar player so I’m here to rob the cradle, artistically speaking.”

I was barely sixteen years old and a little bit intimidated by this ballsy guy, but I’d said why not. “Who else is in the band?”

“Me on drums. You on guitar.”

“And?”

“Those are the most important parts, don’t you think? Fantastic drummers and singing guitar players don’t grow on trees, not even in Doncaster. Don’t worry, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’m Liam by the way.” He stuck out his hand. It was crusted with calluses, always a good sign on a drummer.

Within a month, Liam had drafted Niall and Zayn, and we’d christened ourselves White Eskimo and started writing songs together. A month after that, we had our first gig. It was another house party, but nothing like the ones I’d played with Infinity 89. Right from the get-go, something was different. When I slashed out my first chord, it was like turning off a light. Everything just fell silent. We had people’s attention and we kept it. In the empty space between songs, people cheered and then got quiet, anticipating our next song. Over time, they’d start shouting requests. After a while, they got to know our lyrics so well that they’d sing along, which was handy when I spaced a lyric.

Pretty soon, we moved on to playing in bigger clubs. I could sometimes make out bar sounds in the background—the clink of glasses, the shouts of orders to a bartender. I also started to hear people scream my name for the first time. “Harry!” “Over here!” A lot of those voices belonged to girls.

The girls I mostly ignored. At this point, I’d started obsessing about a guy who never came to our shows but who I’d seen playing piano at school. And when Louis had become my boyfriend, and then started coming to my shows—and to my surprise, seemed to actually enjoy, if not the gigs, then at least our music—I sometimes listened for him. I wanted to hear his voice calling out my name, even though I knew that was something he’d never do. He was a reluctant plus-one. He tended to hang backstage and watch me with a solemn intensity. Even when he loosened up enough to sometimes watch the show like a normal person, from the audience, he remained pretty reserved. But still, I listened for the sound of his voice. It never seemed to matter that I didn’t hear it. Listening for him was half the fun.

As the band got bigger and the shows got bigger, the cheers just grew louder. And then for a while, it all went quiet. There was no music. No band. No fans. No Louis.

When it came back—the music, the gigs, the crowds—it all sounded different. Even during that two-week tour right on the heels of Stockholm Syndrome’s release, I could tell how much had changed just by how different everything sounded. The wall of sound as we played enveloped the band, almost as if we were playing in a bubble made of nothing other than our own noise. And in between the songs, there was this screaming and shrieking. Soon, much sooner than I ever could’ve imagined, we were playing these enormous venues: arenas and stadiums, to more than fifteen thousand fans.

At these venues, there are just so many people, and so much sound, that it’s almost impossible to differentiate a specific voice. All I hear, aside from our own instruments now blaring out of the most powerful speakers available, is that wild scream from the crowd when we’re backstage and the lights go down right before we go out. And once we’re onstage, the constant shrieking of the crowd melds so it sounds like the furious howl of a hurricane; some nights I swear I can feel the breath of those fifteen thousand screams.

I don’t like this sound. I find the monolithic nature of it disorienting. For a few gigs, we traded our wedge monitors for in-ear pieces. It was perfect sound, as though we were in the studio, the roar of the crowd blocked off. But that was even worse in a way. I feel so disconnected from the crowds as it is, by the distance between them and us, a distance separated by a vast expanse of stage and an army of security keeping fans from bounding up to touch us or stage-dive the way they used to. But more than that, I don’t like that it’s so hard to hear any one single voice break through. I dunno. Maybe I’m still listening for that one voice.

Every so often during a show, though, as me or Zayn pause to retune our guitars or someone takes a swig from a bottle of water, I’ll pause and strain to pick out a voice from the crowd. And every so often, I can. Can hear someone shouting for a specific song or screaming I love you! Or chanting my name.

As I stand here on the Brooklyn Bridge I’m thinking about those stadium shows, of their hurricane wail of white noise. Because all I can hear now is a roaring in my head, a wordless howl as Louis disappears and I try to let him.

But there’s something else, too. A small voice trying to break through, to puncture the roar of nothingness. And the voice grows stronger and stronger, and it’s my voice this time and it’s asking a question: How does he know?


	18. EIGHTEEN

Ooh Spaces between us keep getting deeper

It’s harder to reach ya even though I try

Spaces between us hold all our secrets

Leaving us speechless and I don’t know why

 

Who’s gonna be the first to say goodbye

 “SPACES”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 10

Louis’ gone.

The bridge looks like a ghost ship from another time even as it fills up with the most twenty-first-century kind of people, early-morning joggers.

And me, alone again.

But I’m still standing. I’m still breathing. And somehow, I’m okay.

But still the question is gaining momentum and volume: How does he know? Because I never told anyone what I asked of him. Not the nurses. Not the grandparents. Not Lauren. And not Louis. So how does he know?

If you stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll quit the band, go with you to Oxford. But if you need me to go away, I’ll do that, too. Maybe coming back to your old life would just be too painful, maybe it’d be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I’d do it. I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.

That was my vow. And it’s been my secret. My burden. My shame. That I asked him to stay. That he listened. Because after I promised him what I promised him, and played him a Piano Guys piece, it had seemed as if he had heard. He’d squeezed my hand and I’d thought it was going to be like in the movies, but all he’d done was squeeze. And stayed unconscious. But that squeeze had turned out to be him first voluntary muscle movement; it was followed by more squeezes, then by his eyes opening for a flutter or two, and then longer. One of the nurses had explained that Louis’ brain was like a baby bird, trying to poke its way out of an eggshell, and that squeeze was the beginning of an emergence that went on for a few days until he woke up and asked for water.

Whenever he talked about the accident, Louis said the entire week was a blur. He didn’t remember a thing. And I wasn’t about to tell him about the promise I’d made. A promise that in the end, I was forced to keep.

But he knew.

No wonder he hates me.

In a weird way, it’s a relief. I’m so tired of carrying this secret around. I’m so tired of feeling bad for making him live and feeling angry at him for living without me and feeling like a hypocrite for the whole mess.

I stand there on the bridge for a while, letting him get away, and then I walk the remaining few hundred feet to the ramp down. I’ve seen dozens of taxis pass by on the roadway below, so even though I have no clue where I am, I’m pretty sure I’ll find a cab to bring me back to my hotel. But when I get down the ramp, I’m in a plaza area, not where the car traffic lets out. I flag down a jogger, a middle-aged guy chugging off the bridge, and ask where I can get a taxi, and he points me toward a bunch of buildings. “There’s usually a queue on weekdays. I don’t know about weekends, but I’m sure you’ll find a cab somewhere.”

He’s wearing an iPod and has pulled out the earbuds to talk to me, but the music is still playing. And it’s Fugazi. The guy is running to Fugazi, the very tail end of “Smallpox Champion.” Then the song clicks over and it’s “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. And the music, it’s like, I dunno, fresh bread on an empty stomach or a woodstove on a frigid day. It’s reaching out of the earbuds and beckoning me.

The guy keeps looking at me. “Are you Harry Styles? From White Eskimo?” he asks. Not at all fanlike, just curious.

It takes a lot of effort to stop listening to the music and give him my attention. “Yeah.” I reach out my hand.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” he says after we shake, “but what are you doing walking around Brooklyn at six thirty on a Saturday morning? Are you lost or something?”

“No, I’m not lost. Not anymore anyway.”

Mick Jagger is crooning away and I practically have to bite my lip to keep from singing along. It used to be I never went anywhere without my tunes. And then it was like everything else, take it or leave it. But now I’ll take it. Now I need it. “Can I ask you for an insanely huge and just plain insane favor?” I ask.

“Okaaay?”

“Can I borrow your iPod? Just for the day? If you give me your name and address, I’ll have it messengered over to you. I promise you’ll have it back by tomorrow’s run.”

He shakes his head, laughs. “One butt-crack-of-dawn run a weekend is enough for me, but yeah, you can borrow it. The buzzer on my building doesn’t work, so just deliver it to Nick at the Southside Café on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn. I’m in there every morning.”

“Nick. Southside Café. Sixth Avenue. Brooklyn. I won’t forget. I promise.”

“I believe you,” he says, spooling the wires. “I’m afraid you won’t find any White Eskimo on there.”

“Better yet. I’ll have this back to you by tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Battery was fully charged when I left so you should be good for at least . . . an hour. The thing’s a dinosaur.” He chuckles softly. Then he takes off running, tossing a wave at me without looking back.

I plug myself into the iPod; it’s truly battered. I make a note to get him a new one when I return this one. I scroll through his collection—everything from Charlie Parker to Minutemen to Yo La Tengo. He’s got all these playlists. I choose one titled Good Songs. And when the piano riff at the start of the New Pornographers’ “Challengers” kicks in, I know I’ve put myself in good hands. Next up is some Andrew Bird, followed by a kick-ass Billy Bragg and Wilco song I haven’t heard in years and then Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago,” which is a song I used to love but had to stop listening to because it always made me feel too stirred up. But now it’s just right. It’s like a cool bath after a fever sweat, helping to soothe the itch of all those unanswerable questions I just can’t be tormenting myself with anymore.

I spin the volume up all the way, so it’s blasting even my battle-worn eardrums. That, along with the racket of downtown Brooklyn waking up—metal grates grinding and buses chugging—is pretty damn loud. So when a voice pierces the din, I almost don’t hear it. But there it is, the voice I’ve been listening for all these years.

“Harry!” it screams.

I don’t believe it at first. I turn off Sufjan. I look around. And then there he is, in front of me now, his face streaked with tears. Saying my name again, like it’s the first word I’ve ever heard.

I let go. I truly did. But there he is. Right in front of me.

“I thought I’d lost you. I went back and looked for you on the bridge but I didn’t see you and I figured you’d walked back to the Manhattan side and I got this dumb idea that I could beat you over in a cab and ambush you on the other side. I know this is selfish. I heard what you said up there on the bridge, but we can’t leave it like that. I can’t. Not again. We have to say good-bye differently. Bet—”

“Louis?” I interrupt. My voice is a question mark and a caress. It stops him babbling cold. “How did you know?”

The question is out of the blue. Yet he seems to know exactly what I’m asking about. “Oh. That,” he says. “That’s complicated.”

I start to back away from him. I have no right to ask him, and he isn’t under any obligation to tell me. “It’s okay. We’re good now. I’m good now.”

“No, Harry, stop,” Louis says.

I stop.

“I want to tell you. I need to tell you everything. I just think I need some coffee before I can get it together enough to explain.”

He leads me out of downtown into a historic district to a bakery on a cobblestoned street. Its windows are darkened, the door locked, by all signs the place is closed. But Louis knocks and within a minute a bushyhaired man with flour clinging to his unruly beard swings open the door and shouts bonjour to Louis and kisses him on both cheeks. Louis introduces me to Hassan, who disappears into the bakery, leaving the door open so that the warm aroma of butter and vanilla waft into the morning air. He returns with two large cups of coffee and a brown paper bag, already staining dark with butter.He hands me my coffee, and I open it to see it’s steaming and black just like I like it.

It’s morning now. We find a bench on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, another one of Louis’ favorite New York spots, he tells me. It’s right on the East River, with Manhattan so close you can almost touch it. We sit in companionable silence, sipping our coffee, eating Hassan’s still-warm croissants. And it feels so good, so like old times that part of me would like to just click a magic stopwatch, exist in this moment forever. Except there are no magic stopwatches and there are questions that need to be answered. Louis, however, seems in no rush. He sips, he chews, he looks out at the city. Finally, when he’s drained his coffee, he turns to me.

“I didn’t lie before when I said I didn’t remember anything about the accident or after,” he begins. “But then I did start remembering things. Not exactly remembering, but hearing details of things and having them feel intensely familiar. I told myself it was because I’d heard the stories over and over, but that wasn’t it.

“Fast-forward about a year and a half. I’m on my seventh or eighth therapist.”

“So you are in therapy?”

He gives me a cockeyed look. “Of course I am. I used to go through shrinks like shoes. They all told me the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“That I was angry. That I was angry the accident happened. That I was angry I was the only survivor. That I was angry at you.” He turns to me with an apologetic grimace. “The other stuff all made sense, but you I didn’t get. I mean, why you? But I was. I could feel how . . .” he trails off for a second, “furious I was,” he finishes quietly. “There were all the obvious reasons, how you withdrew from me, how much the accident changed us. But it didn’t add up to this lethal fury I suddenly felt once I got away. I think really, somewhere in me, I must’ve known all along that you asked me to stay—way before I actually remembered it. Does that make any sense?”

No. Yes. I don’t know. “None of this makes sense,” I say.

“I know. So, I was angry with you. I didn’t know why. I was angry with the world. I did know why. I hated all my therapists for being useless. I was this little ball of self-destructive fury, and none of them could do anything but tell me that I was a little ball of self-destructive fury. Until I found Nancy, not one of them helped me as much as my Oxford profs did. I mean, hello! I knew I was angry. Tell me what to do with the anger, please. Anyhow, Ernesto suggested hypnotherapy. It helped him quit smoking, I guess.” He elbows me in the ribs.

Of course Mr. Perfect wouldn’t smoke. And of course, he’d be the one who helped Louis unearth the reason he hates me.

“It was kind of risky,” Louis continues. “Hypnosis tends to unlock hidden memories. Some trauma is just too much for the conscious mind to handle and you have to go in through a back door to access it. So I reluctantly submitted to a few sessions. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. No swinging amulet, no metronome. It was more like those guided imagery exercises they’d sometimes have us do at camp. At first, nothing happened, and then I went to Vermont for the summer and quit.

“But a few weeks later, I started to get these flashes. Random flashes. Like I could remember a surgery, could actually hear the specific music the doctors played in the operating room. I thought about calling them to ask if what I remembered was true, but so much time had passed I doubted they’d remember. Besides, I didn’t really feel like I needed to ask them. My dad used to say that when I was born I looked so totally familiar to him, he was overwhelmed with this feeling that he’d known me all his life, which was funny, considering how little I looked like him or Mom. But when I had my first memories, I felt that same certainty, that they were real and mine. I didn’t put the pieces together fully until I was working on a piano piece—a lot of memories seem to hit when I’m playing Piano Guys – A Thousand Years.”

I open my mouth to say something, but at first nothing comes out. “I played you that,” I finally say.

“I know.” He doesn’t seem surprised by my confirmation.

I lean forward, put my head between my knees, and take deep breaths. I feel Louis’ hand gently touch the back of my neck.

“Harry?” His voice is tentative. “There’s more. And here’s where it gets a little freaky. It makes a certain sense to me that my mind somehow recorded the things that were happening around my body while I was unconscious. But there are other things, other memories. . . . ”

“Like what?” My voice is a whisper.

“Most of it is hazy, but I have certain strong memories of things I couldn’t know because I wasn’t there. I have this one memory. It’s of you. It’s dark out. And you’re standing outside the hospital entrance under the floodlights, waiting to come see me. You’re wearing your leather jacket, and looking up. Like you’re looking for me. Did you do that?”

Louis cups my chin up and lifts my face, this time apparently seeking some affirmation that this moment was real. I want to tell him that he’s right, but I’ve completely lost the ability to speak. My expression, however, seems to offer the validation he’s after. He nods his head slightly. “How? How, Harry? How could I know that?”

I’m not sure if the question’s rhetorical or if he thinks I have a clue to his metaphysical mystery. And I’m in no state to answer either way because I’m crying. I don’t realize it till I taste the salt against my lips. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried but, once I accept the mortification of sniveling like a baby, the floodgates open and I’m sobbing now, in front of Louis. In front of the whole damn world.


	19. NINETEEN

The first time I ever saw Louis Tomlinson was six years ago. Our high school had this arts program and if you chose music as your elective, you could take music classes or opt for independent study to practice in the studios. Louis and I both went for the independent study.

I’d seen him playing his piano a couple of times but nothing had really registered. I mean he was cute and all, but, not exactly my type. He was a classical musician. I was a rock guy. Oil and water and all that.

I didn’t really notice him until the day I saw him not playing. He was just sitting in one of the soundproof practice booths, his piano in front of him, his fingers poised a few inches above the keys. His eyes were closed and his brow was a little furrowed. He was so still, it seemed like he’d taken a brief vacation from his body. And even though he wasn’t moving, even though his eyes were closed, I somehow knew that he was listening to music then, was grabbing the notes from the silence, like a squirrel gathering acorns for the winter, before he got down to the business of playing. I stood there, suddenly riveted by him, until he seemed to wake up and start playing with this intense concentration. When he finally looked at me, I hustled away.

After that, I became kind of fascinated by him and by what I guessed was his ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I’d wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching him play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because he was as dedicated a musician as I was and that he was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what he heard in the silence.

During all the time we were together, I don’t think I ever found out. But once I was with him, I didn’t need to. We were both music-obsessed, each in our own way. If we didn’t entirely understand the other person’s obsession, it didn’t matter, because we understood our own.

I know the exact moment Louis is talking about. Hannah and I had driven to the hospital in Sophia’s pink Dodge Dart. I don’t remember asking Liam’s girlfriend to borrow her car. I don’t remember driving it. I don’t remember piloting the car up into the hills where the hospital is or how I even knew the way. Just that one minute I was in a theater in downtown Manchester, sound-checking for that night’s show when Hannah showed up to deliver the awful news. And the next minute I was standing outside the hospital.

What Louis inexplicably remembers, it’s sort of the first pinpoint of clarity in that whole petri-dish blur between hearing the news and arriving at the trauma center. Hannah and I had just parked the car and I’d walked out of the garage ahead of her. I’d needed a couple of seconds to gather my strength, to steel myself for what I was about to face. And I’d remembered looking at the hulking hospital building and wondering if Louis was somewhere in there, and feeling a heart-in-throat panic that he’d died in the time it had taken Hannah to fetch me. But then I’d felt this wave of something, not really hope, not really relief, but just a sort of knowledge that Louis was still in there. And that had been enough to pull me through the doors.

They say that things happen for a reason, but I don’t know that I buy that. I don’t know that I’ll ever see a reason for what happened to Lauren, Brandon, and Sarah that day. But it took forever to get in to see Louis. I got turned away from the ICU by Louis’ nurses, and then Hannah and I devised this whole plan to sneak in. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I think in a weird way, I was probably stalling. I was gathering my strength. I didn’t want to lose it in front of him. I guess part of me somehow knew that Louis, deep in his coma, would be able to tell.

Of course, I ended up losing it in front of him anyway. When I finally saw him the first time, I almost blew chunks. His skin looked like tissue paper. His eyes were covered with tape. Tubes ran in and out of every part of his body, pumping liquids and blood in and draining some scary-ass shit out. I’m ashamed to say it, but when I first came in, I wanted to run away.

But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. So instead, I just focused on the part of him that still looked remotely like Louis—his hands. There were monitors stuck to his fingers, but they still looked like his hands. I touched the fingertips of his left hand, which felt worn and smooth, like old leather. I ran my fingers across the nubby calluses of his thumbs. His hands were freezing, just like they always were, so I warmed them, just like I always did.

And it was while warming his hands that I thought about how lucky it was that they looked okay. Because without hands, there’d be no music and without music, he’d have lost everything. And I remember thinking that somehow Louis had to realize that, too. That he needed to be reminded that he had the music to come back to. I ran out of the ICU, part of me fearing that I might never see him alive again, but somehow knowing that I had to do this one thing. When I came back, I played him the Piano Guys.

And that’s also when I made him the promise. The promise that he’s held me to.

I did the right thing. I know it now. I must’ve always known, but it’s been so hard to see through all my anger. And it’s okay if he’s angry. It’s even okay if he hates me. It was selfish what I asked him to do, even if it wound up being the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done. The most unselfish thing I’ll have to keep doing.

But I’d do it again. I know that now. I’d make that promise a thousand times over and lose him a thousand times over to have heard him play last night or to see him in the morning sunlight. Or even without that. Just to know that he’s somewhere out there. Alive.

Louis watches me lose my shit all over the Promenade. He bears witness as the fissures open up, the lava leaking out, this great explosion of what, I guess to him, must look like grief.

But I’m not crying out of grief. I’m crying out of gratitude.


	20. TWENTY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi loves! I'm almost there, this and three more chapters left. Hope you enjoy it xx

There’s a lightning in your eyes I can’t deny

Then there’s me inside a sinking boat running out of time

Without you I’ll never make it out alive

But I know yes I know we’ll be alright

“READY TO RUN”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 2

When I get a grip over myself and calm down, my limbs feel like they’re made of dead wood. My eyes start to droop. I just drank a huge cup of insanely strong coffee, and it might as well have been laced with sleeping pills. I could lie down right here on this bench. I turn to Louis. I tell him I need to sleep

“My place is a few blocks away,” he says. “You can crash there.”

I have that floppy calm that follows a cry. I haven’t felt this way since I was a child, a sensitive kid, who would scream at some injustice or another until, all cried out, my mother would tuck me into bed. I picture Louis, tucking me into a single boy’s bed, pulling the Buzz Lightyear sheets up to my chin.

It’s full-on morning now. People are awake and out and about. As we walk, the quiet residential area gives way to a commercial strip, full of boutiques, cafés, and the hipsters who frequent them. I’m recognized. But I don’t bother with any subterfuge—no sunglasses, no cap. I don’t try to hide at all. Louis weaves among the growing crowds and then turns off onto a leafy side street full of brownstones and brick buildings. He stops in front of a small redbrick carriage house. “Home sweet home. It’s a sublet from a professional violinist who’s with the Vienna Philharmonic now. I’ve been here a record nine months!”

I follow him into the most compact house I’ve ever seen. The first floor consists of little more than a living room and kitchen with a sliding-glass door leading out to a garden that’s twice as deep as the house. There’s a white sectional couch, and he motions for me to lie down on it. I kick off my shoes and flop onto one of the sections, sinking into the plush cushions. Louis lifts my head, places a pillow underneath it, and a soft blanket over me, tucking me in just as I’d hoped he would.

I listen for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs up to what must be the bedroom, but instead, I feel a slight bounce in the upholstery as Louis takes up a position on the other end of the couch. He rustles his legs together a few times. His feet are only inches away from my own. Then he lets out a long sigh and his breathing slows into a rhythmic pattern.He’s asleep. Within minutes, so am I.

When I wake up, light is flooding the apartment, and I feel so refreshed that for a second I’m sure I’ve slept for ten hours and have missed my flight. But a quick glance at the kitchen clock shows me it’s just before two o’clock, still Saturday. I’ve only been asleep for a few hours, and I have to meet Paul at the airport at five.

Louis’ still asleep, breathing deeply and almost snoring. I watch him there for a while. He looks so peaceful and so familiar. Even before I became the insomniac I am now, I always had problems falling asleep at night, whereas Louis would read a book for five minutes, roll onto his side, and be gone. A strand of hair has fallen onto his forehead and it moves over his eyes and back again with each inhalation and exhalation. Without even thinking I lean over and move the strand away, my finger accidentally brushing his lips. It feels so natural, so much like the last three years haven’t passed, that I’m almost tempted to stroke his cheeks, his chin, his forehead.

Almost. But not quite. It’s like I’m seeing Louis through a prism and he’s mostly the boy I knew but something has changed, the angles are off, and so now, the idea of me touching a sleeping Louis isn’t sweet or romantic. It’s stalkerish.

I straighten up and stretch out my limbs. I’m about to wake him—but can’t quite bring myself to. Instead, I walk around his house. I was so out of it when we came in a few hours ago, I didn’t really take it in. Now that I do, I see that it looks oddly like the house Louis grew up in. There’s the same mismatched jumble of pictures on the wall—a Velvet Elvis, a 1955 poster advertising the World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees—and the same decorative touches, like chili-pepper lights festooning the doorways.

And photos, they’re everywhere, hanging on the walls, covering every inch of counter and shelf space. Hundreds of photos of his family, including what seem to be the photos that once hung in his old house. There’s Lauren and Brandon’s wedding portrait; a shot of Brandon in a spiked leather jacket holding a tiny baby Louis in one of his hands; eight-year-old Louis, a giant grin on his face, clutching his piano; Louis and Hannah holding a red-faced Sarah, minutes after she was born. There’s even that heartbreaking shot of Louis reading to Sarah, the one that I could never bear to look at at Louis’ grandparents’, though somehow here, in Louis’ place, it doesn’t give me that same kick in the gut.

I walk through the small kitchen, and there’s a veritable gallery of shots of Louis’ grandparents in front of a plethora of orchestra pits, of Louis’ aunts and uncles and cousins hiking through Doncaster’s hills or lifting up pints of beer. There are a jumble of shots of Jake and Amanda and Alexa and the little girl who must be Sally. There are pictures of Hannah and Louis from high school and one of the two of them posing on top of the Empire State Building—a jolting reminder that their relationship wasn’t truncated, they have a history of which I know nothing. There’s another picture of Hannah, wearing a flak jacket, her hair tangled and down and blowing in a dusty wind.

There are pictures of musicians in formal wear, holding flutes of champagne. Of a bright-eyed man in a tux with a mass of wild curls holding a baton, and the same guy conducting a bunch of ratty-looking kids, and then him again, next to a gorgeous black woman, kissing a not-ratty-looking kid. This must be Ernesto.

I wander into the back garden for my wake-up smoke. I pat my pockets, but all I find there is my wallet, my sunglasses, the borrowed iPod, and the usual assortment of guitar picks that always seem to live on me. Then I remember that I must have left my cigarettes on the bridge. No smokes. No pills. I guess today is the banner day for quitting bad habits.

I come back inside and take another look around. This isn’t the house I expected. From all his talk of moving, I’d imagined a place full of boxes, something impersonal and antiseptic. And despite what he’d said about spirits, I wouldn’t have guessed that he’d surround himself so snugly with his ghosts.

Except for my ghost. There’s not a single picture of me, even though Hannah included me in so many of the family shots; he’d even hung a framed photo of me and Louis and Sarah in Halloween costumes above their old living-room mantel, a place of honor in the Tomlinson home. But not here. There are none of the silly shots Louis and I used to take of each other and of ourselves, kissing or mugging while one of us held the camera at arm’s length. I loved those pictures. They always cut off half a head or were obscured by someone’s finger, but they seemed to capture something true.

I’m not offended. Earlier, I might’ve been. But I get it now. Whatever place I held in Louis’ life, in Louis’ heart, was irrevocably altered that day in the hospital three and a half years ago.

Closure. I loathe that word. Shrinks love it. Kendall loves it. She says that I’ve never had closure with Louis. “More than five million people have bought and listened to my closure,” is my standard reply.

Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times. But they won’t be with Louis—or with Kendall.

I glance at the clock. I need to get back to Manhattan, pack up my stuff, reply to the most urgent of the emails that have no doubt piled up, and get myself to the airport. I’ll need to get a cab out of here, and before that I’ll need to wake Louis up and say a proper good-bye.

I decide to make tea. The smell of it alone used to rouse him. On the mornings I used to sleep at his house, sometimes I woke up early to hang with Sarah. After I let him sleep to a decent hour, I’d take the pot right into his room and waft it around until he lifted his head from the pillow, his eyes all dreamy and soft.

I go into the kitchen and instinctively seem to know where everything is, as though this is my kitchen and I’ve made tea here a thousand times before. The metal pot is in the cabinet above the sink. The tea in a jar on the freezer door. I take the rich, dark tea into the chamber atop the pot, then fill it with water and put it on the stove. The hissing sound fills the air, followed by the rich aroma. I can almost see it, like a cartoon cloud, floating across the room, prodding Louis awake.

And sure enough, before the whole pot is brewed, he’s stretching out on the couch, gulping a bit for air like he does when he’s waking up. When he sees me in his kitchen, he looks momentarily confused. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m bustling around like a housewife or just because I’m here in the first place. Then I remember what he said about his daily wake-up call of loss. “Are you remembering it all over again?” I ask the question. Out loud. Because I want to know and because he asked me to ask.

“No,” he says. “Not this morning.” He yawns, then stretches again. “I thought I dreamed last night. Then I smelled tea.”

“Sorry,” I mutter.

He’s smiling as he kicks off his blanket. “Do you really think that if you don’t mention my family I’ll forget them?”

“No,” I admit. “I guess not.”

“And as you can see, I’m not trying to forget.” Louis motions to the photos.

“I was looking at those. Pretty impressive gallery you’ve got. Of everyone.”

“Thanks. They keep me company.”

I look at the pictures, imagining that one day Louis’ own children will fill more of his frames, creating a new family for him, a continuing generation that I won’t be a part of.

“I know they’re just pictures,” he continues, “but some days they really help me get up in the morning. Well, them, and tea.”

Ahh, the tea. I go to the kitchen and open the cabinets where I know the cups will be, though I’m a little startled to find that even these are the same collection of 1950s and 60s ceramic mugs that I’ve used so many times before; amazed that he’s hauled them from dorm to dorm, from apartment to apartment. I look around for my favourite mug, the one with the dancing coffeepots on it, and am so damn happy to find it’s still here. It’s almost like having my picture on the wall, too. A little piece of me still exists, even if the larger part of me can’t.

I pour myself a cup, then pour Louis’, adding a dash of half-and-half, like he takes it.

“I like the pictures,” I say. “Keeps things interesting.”

Louis nods, blows ripples into his tea.

“And I miss them, too,” I say. “Every day.”

He looks surprised at that. Not that I miss them, but, I guess by my admitting it, finally. He nods solemnly. “I know,” he says.

He walks around the room, running his fingers lightly along the picture frames. “I’m running out of space,”she says. “I had to put up a bunch of Hannah’s recent shots in the bathroom. Have you talked to her lately?”

He must know what I did to Hannah. “No.”

“Really? Then you don’t know about the scandale?”

I shake my head.

“She dropped out of college last year. When the war flared up in Afghanistan, Hannah decided, screw it, I want to be a photographer and the best education is in the field. So she just took her cameras and off she went. She started selling all these shots to the AP and the New York Times. She cruises around in one of those burkas and hides all her photographic equipment underneath the robes and then whips them off to get her shot.”

“I’ll bet Mrs. Walker loves that.” Hannah’s mom was notoriously overprotective. The last I’d heard of her, she was having a freak-out that Hannah was going to school across the country, which, Hannah had said, was precisely the point.

Louis laughs. “At first, Hannah told her family she was just taking a semester off, but now she’s getting really successful so she’s officially dropped out, and Mrs. Walker has officially had a nervous breakdown. And then there’s the fact that Hannah’s a nice Jewish girl in a very Muslim country.” Louis blows on his tea and sips. “But, on the other hand, now Hannah gets her stuff in the New York Times, and she just got a feature assignment for National Geographic, so it gives Mrs. Walker some bragging ammo.”

“Hard for a mother to resist,” I say.

“She’s a big White Eskimo fan, you know?”

“Mrs. Walker? I always had her pegged as more hip-hop.”

Louis grins. “No. She’s into pop rock. Indie. Hannah. She saw you guys play in Bangkok. Said it poured rain and you played right through it.”

“She was at that show? I wish she would’ve come backstage, said hi,” I say, even though I know why she wouldn’t have. Still, she came to the show. She must have forgiven me a little bit.

“I told her the same thing. But she had to leave right away. She was supposed to be in Bangkok for some R & R, but that rain you were playing in was actually a cyclone

somewhere else and she had to run off and cover it. She’s a very badass shutterbabe these days.”

I think of Hannah chasing Taliban insurgents and ducking flying trees. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine. “It’s funny,” I begin.

“What is?” Louis asks.

“Hannah being a war photographer. All Danger Girl.”

“Yeah, it’s a laugh riot.”

“That’s not how I meant. It’s just: Hannah. You. Me. We all came from this nowhere town in Doncaster, and look at us. All three of us have gone to, well, extremes. You gotta admit, it’s kind of weird.”

“It’s not weird at all,” Louis says, shaking out a bowl of cornflakes. “We were all forged in the crucible. Now come on, have some cereal.”

I’m not hungry. I’m not even sure I can eat a single cornflake, but I sit down because my place at the Tomlinson family table has just been restored.

Time has a weight to it, and right now I can feel it heavy over me. It’s almost three o’clock. Another day is half over and tonight I leave for the tour. I hear the clicking of the antique clock on Louis’ wall. I let the minutes go by longer than I should before I finally speak.

“We both have our flights. I should probably get moving,” I say. My voice sounds faraway but I feel weirdly calm. “Are there taxis around here?”

“No, we get back and forth to Manhattan by river raft,” he jokes. “You can call a car,” he adds after a moment.

I stand up, make my way toward the kitchen counter where Louis’ phone sits. “What’s the number?” I ask.

“Seven-one-eight,” Louis begins. Then he interrupts himself. “Wait.”

At first I think he has to pause to recall the number, but I see his eyes, at once unsure and imploring.

“There’s one last thing,” he continues, his voice hesitant. “Something I have that really belongs to you.”

“My Wipers T-shirt?”

He shakes his head. “That’s long gone, I’m afraid. Come on. It’s upstairs.”

I follow him up the creaking steps. At the top of the narrow landing to my right I can see his bedroom with its slanted ceilings. To my left is a closed door. Louis opens it, revealing a small studio. In the corner is a cabinet with a keypad. Louis punches in a code and the door opens.

When I see what he pulls out of the cabinet, at first I’m like, Oh, right, my guitar. Because here in Louis’ little house in Brooklyn is my old electric guitar, my Les Paul Junior. The guitar I bought at a pawnshop with my pizza-delivery earnings when I was a teenager. It’s the guitar I used to record all of our stuff leading up to, and including, Stockholm Syndrome. It’s the guitar I auctioned off for charity and have regretted doing so ever since.

It’s sitting in its old case, with my old Fugazi and K Records stickers, with the stickers from Louis’ dad’s old band, even. Everything is the same, the strap, the dent from when I’d dropped it off a stage. Even the dust smells familiar.

And I’m just taking it all in, so it’s a few seconds before it really hits me. This is my guitar. Louis has my guitar. Louis is the one who bought my guitar for some exorbitant sum, which means that Louis knew it was up for auction. I look around the room. Among the sheet music is a pile of magazines, my face peeking out from the covers. And then I remember something back on the bridge, Louis justifying why he left me by reciting the lyrics to “Spaces.”

And suddenly, it’s like I’ve been wearing earplugs all night and they’ve fallen out, and everything that was muffled is now clear. But also so loud and jarring.

Louis has my guitar. It’s such a straightforward thing and yet I don’t know that I would’ve been more surprised had Sarah popped out of the closet. I feel faint. I sit down. Louis stands right in front of me, holding my guitar by the neck, offering it back to me.

“You?” is all I can manage to choke out.

“Always me,” he replies softly, bashfully. “Who else?”

My brain has vacated my body. My speech is reduced to the barest of basics. “But . . . why?”

“Somebody had to save it from the Hard Rock Café,” Louis says with a laugh. But I can hear the potholes in hid voice, too.

“But . . .” I grasp for the words like a drowning man reaching for floating debris,“ . . . you said you hated me?”

Louis lets out a long, deep sigh. “I know. I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.”

He’s holding out the guitar, nudging it toward me. He wants me to take it, but I couldn’t lift a cotton ball right now.

He keeps staring, keeps offering.

“But what about Ernesto?”

A look of puzzlement flits across his face, followed by amusement. “He’s my mentor, Harry. My friend. He’s married.” He looks down for a beat. When his gaze returns, his amusement has hardened into defensiveness. “Besides, why should you care?”

Go back to your ghost, I hear Kendall telling me. But she has it wrong. Kendall is the one who’s been living with the ghost—the specter of a man who never stopped loving someone else.

“There never would’ve been a Kendall if you hadn’t decided you needed to hate me,” I reply.

Louis takes this one square on the chin. “I don’t hate you. I don’t think I ever really did. It was just anger. And once I faced it head-on, once I understood it, it dissipated.” He looks down, takes a deep breath, and exhales a tornado. “I know I owe you some kind of an apology; I’ve been trying to get it out all night but it’s like those words—apology, sorry—are too measly for what you deserve.” He shakes his head. “I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don’t know if those two things can both be true but that’s how it was. If it’s any comfort, after a while, when it didn’t feel necessary anymore, when it felt hugely wrong, all I was left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I had to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.”

“It’s not perfect,” I say.

“I get that now, but how was I supposed to know? You were so very, very far from me. And I’d accepted that. Accepted that as my punishment for what I’d done. And then . . .” he trails off.

“What?”

He takes a gulp of air and grimaces. “And then Harry Styles shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a piano. And for this one, they gave me you.”

Every hair on my body stands on end, my whole body alert with a chill.

He hastily wipes tears from his eyes with the back of his hand and takes a deep breath. “Here, are you going to take this thing or what? I haven’t tuned it for a while.”

I used to have dreams like this. Louis back from the not-dead, in front of me, alive to me. But it got so even in the dreams I knew they were unreal and could anticipate the blare of my alarm, so I’m kind of listening now, waiting for the alarm to go off. But it doesn’t. And when I close my fingers around the guitar, the wood and strings are solid and root me to the earth. They wake me up. And he’s still here.

And he’s looking at me, at my guitar, and at his piano and at the clock on the windowsill. And I see what he wants, and it’s the same thing I’ve wanted for years now but I can’t believe that after all this time, and now that we’re out of time, he’s asking for it. But still, I give a little nod. He plugs in the guitar, tosses me the cord, and turns on the amp.

“Can you give me an A?” I ask. Louis plays his piano’s A key. I tune from that and then I strum an A-minor, and as the chord bounces off the walls, I feel that dash of electricity shimmy up my spine in a way it hasn’t done for a long, long time.

I look at Louis. He’s sitting across from me, his piano in front of him. His eyes are closed and I can tell he’s doing that thing, listening for something in the silence. Then all at once, Louis seems to have heard what he needs to hear. His eyes are open and on me again, like they never left. He places his fingers on keys, gestures toward my guitar with a slight tilt of his head. “Are you ready?” he asks.

There are so many things I’d like to tell him, top among them is that I’ve always been ready. But instead, I turn up the amp, fish a pick out of my pocket, and just say yes.


	21. TWENTY-ONE

We play for what seems like hours, days, years. Or maybe it’s seconds. I can’t even tell anymore. We speed up, then slow down, we scream our instruments. We grow serious. We laugh. We grow quiet. Then loud. My heart is pounding, my blood is grooving, my whole body is thrumming as I’m remembering: Concert doesn’t mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony.

When we finally pause, I’m sweating and Louis’ panting hard, like he’s just sprinted for miles. We sit there in silence, the sound of our rapid breaths slowing in tandem, the beats of our hearts steadying. I look at the clock. It’s past five. Louis follows my gaze. He places his hands in his lap.

“What now?” he asks.

“Schubert? Ramones?” I say, though I know he’s not taking requests. But all I can think to do is keep playing because for the first time in a long time there’s nothing more I want to do. And I’m scared of what happens when the music ends.

Louis gestures to the digital clock flashing ominously from the windowsill. “I don’t think you’ll make your flight.”

I shrug. Never mind the fact that there are at least ten other flights to London tonight alone. “Can you make yours?”

“I don’t want to make mine,” he says shyly. “I have a spare day before the recitals begin. I can leave tomor-row.”

All of a sudden, I picture Paul pacing in Virgin’s departure lounge, wondering where the hell I am, calling a cell phone that’s still sitting on some hotel nightstand. I think of Kendall, out in L.A., unaware of an earthquake going down here in New York that’s sending a tsunami her way. And I realize that before there’s a next, there’s a now that needs attending to. “I need to make some phone calls,” I tell Louis. “To my manager, who’s waiting for me . . . and to Kendall.”

“Oh, right, of course,” he says, his face falling as he rushes to stand up, almost toppling over his piano in his fluster. “The phone’s downstairs. And I should call Tokyo, except I’m pretty sure it’s the middle of the night, so I’ll just email and call later. And my travel agent—”

“Louis,” I interrupt.

“What?”

“We’ll figure this out.”

“Really?” He doesn’t look so sure.

I nod, though my own heart is pounding and the puzzle pieces are whirling as Louis places the cordless phone in my hand. I go into his garden where it’s private and peaceful in the afternoon light, the summer cicadas chirping up a storm. Paul picks up on the first ring and the minute I hear his voice and start talking, reassuring him that I’m okay, the plans start coming out of my mouth as though long, long contemplated. I explain that I’m not coming to London now, that I’m not making any music video, or doing any interviews, but that I’ll be in England for the kickoff of our European tour and that I’ll play every single one of those shows. The rest of the plan that’s formulating in my head—part of which already solidified in some nebulous way last night on the bridge—I keep to myself, but I think Paul senses it.

I can’t see Paul so I can’t know if he blinks or flinches or looks surprised, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “You’ll honor all your tour commitments?” he repeats.

“Yep.”

“What am I supposed to say to the band?”

“They can make the video without me if they want. I’ll see them at the BBC Music Festival,” I say referring to the big music festival in England that we’re headlining to kick off our tour. “And I’ll explain everything then.”

“Where you gonna be in the meantime? If anyone needs you.”

“Tell anyone not to need me,” I answer.

The next call is harder. I wish I hadn’t chosen today to give up smoking. Instead, I do the deep breathing exercises like the doctors showed me and just dial. A journey of a thousand miles starts with ten digits, right?

“I thought that might be you,” Kendall says when she hears my voice. “Did you lose your phone again? Where are you?”

“I’m in New York still. In Brooklyn.” I pause, “With Louis.”

Stone silence fills the line and I fill that silence with a monologue that’s what? . . . I don’t know: a running explanation of the night that happened by accident, an acknowledgment that things never were right between us, right the way she wanted them to be, and as a result, I’ve been a dick of a boyfriend. I tell her I hope she’ll do better with the next guy.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she says with an attempt at a cackle, but it doesn’t quite come out that way. There’s a long pause. I’m waiting for her tirade, her recriminations, all the things I have coming. But she doesn’t say anything.

“Are you still there?” I ask.

“Yeah, I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“I’m thinking about whether I’d rather he’d have died.”

“Jesus, Kendall!”

“Oh, shut up! You don’t get to be the outraged one. Not right now. And the answer’s no. I don’t wish him dead.” She pauses. “Not so sure about you, though.” Then she hangs up.

I stand there, still clutching the phone to my ear, taking in Kendall’s last words, wondering if there might’ve been a shred of absolution in her hostility. I don’t know if it matters because as I smell the cooling air, I feel release and relief wash over me.

After a while, I look up. Louis’ standing at the sliding-glass door, awaiting the all clear. I give him a dazed wave and he slowly makes his way to the bricked patio where I’m standing, still holding the phone. He grabs hold of the top of the phone, like it’s a relay baton, about to be passed off. “Is everything okay?” he asks.

“I’m freed, shall we say, from my previous commitments.”

“Of the tour?” He sounds surprised.

I shake my head. “Not the tour. But all the crap leading up to it. And my other, um, entanglements.”

“Oh.”

We both just stand there for a while, grinning like goofballs, still grasping the cordless. Finally, I let it go and then gently detach the receiver from his grasp and place it on the iron table, never releasing my grip of his hand.

I run my thumb over the calluses on his thumb and up and down the bony ridge of his knuckles and wrist. It’s at once so natural and such a privilege. This is Louis I’m touching. And he’s allowing it. Not just allowing it, but closing his eyes and leaning into it.

“Is this real. Am I allowed to hold this hand?” I ask, bringing it up to my stubbly cheek.

Louis’ smile is melting chocolate. It’s a kick-ass guitar solo. It’s everything good in this world. “Mmmm,” he answers.

I pull him to me. A thousand suns rise from my chest. “Am I allowed to do this?” I ask, taking both of his arms in mine and slow-dancing him around the yard.

His entire face is smiling now. “You’re allowed,” he murmurs.

I run my hands up and down his bare arms. I spin him around the planters, bursting with fragrant flowers. I bury my head into his hair and breathe the smell of him, of the New York City night that’s seared into him. I follow his gaze upward, to the heavens.

“So, do you think they’re watching us?” I ask as I give the scar on his shoulder the slightest of kisses and feel arrows of heat shoot through every part of me.

“Who?” Louis asks, leaning into me, shivering slightly.

“Your family. You seem to think they keep tabs on you. You think they can see this?” I loop my arms around his waist and kiss him right behind his ear, the way that used to drive him crazy, the way that, judging by the sharp intake of breath and the nails that dig into my side, still does. It occurs to me that there’s seemingly something creepy in my line of questioning, but it doesn’t feel that way. Last night, the thought of his family knowing my actions shamed me, but now, it’s not like I want them to see this, but I want them to know about it, about us.

“I like to think they’d give me some privacy,” he says, opening up like a sunflower to the kisses I’m planting on his jaw. “But my neighbors can definitely see this.” He runs his hand through my hair and it’s like he electrocuted my scalp—if electrocution felt so good.

“Howdy, neighbor,” I say, tracing lazy circles around the base of his collar bones with my finger.

His hands dip under my T-shirt, my dirty, stinky, thank-you lucky white T-shirt. His touch isn’t so gentle anymore. It’s probing, the fingertips starting to tap out a Morse code of urgency. “If this goes on much longer, my neighbors are going to get a show,” he whispers.

“We are performers, after all,” I reply, slipping my hands under his shirt and running them up the length of his torso then back down again. Our skins reach outward, like magnets, long deprived of their opposite charge.

I run my finger along his neck, his jawline, and then cup his chin in my hand. And stop. We stand there for a moment, staring at each other, savoring it. And then all at once, we slam together. Louis’ legs are off the ground, wrapped around my waist, his hands digging in my hair, my hands tangled in his. And our lips. There isn’t enough skin, enough spit, enough time, for the lost years that our lips are trying to make up for as they find each other. We kiss. The electric current switches to high. The lights throughout all of Brooklyn must be surging.

“Inside!” Louis half orders, half begs, and with his legs still wrapped around me, I carry him back into his tiny home, back to the couch where only hours before we’d slept, separately together.

This time we’re wide awake. And all together.

We fall asleep, waking in the middle of the night, ravenous. We order takeout. Eat it upstairs in his bed. It’s all like a dream, only the most incredible part is waking up at dawn. With Louis. I see his sleeping form there and feel as happy as I’ve ever been. I pull him to me and fall back asleep.

But when I wake again a few hours later, Louis’ sitting on a chair under the window, his legs wrapped in a tight ball, his body covered in an old afghan that his gran crocheted. And he looks miserable, and the fear that lands like a grenade in my gut is almost as bad as anything I’ve ever feared with him. And that’s saying a lot. All I can think is: I can’t lose you again. It really will kill me this time.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, before I lose the nerve to ask it and do something dumb like walk away before my heart gets truly incinerated.

“I was just thinking about high school,” Louis says sadly.

“That would put anyone in a foul mood.”

Louis doesn’t take the bait. He doesn’t laugh. He slumps in the chair. “I was thinking about how we’re in the same boat all over again. When I was on my way to Oxford and you were on your way to, well, where you are now.” He looks down, twists the yarn from the blanket around his finger until the skin at the tip goes white. “Except we had more time back then to worry about it. And now we have a day, or had a day. Last night was amazing but it was just one night. I really do have to leave for Japan in like seven

hours. And you have the band. Your tour.” He presses against his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“Louis, stop!” My voice bounces off his bedroom walls. “We are not in high school anymore!”

He looks at me, a question hanging in the air.

“Look, my tour doesn’t start for another week.”

A feather of hope starts to float across the space between us.

“And you know, I was thinking I was craving some sushi.”

His smile is sad and rueful, not exactly what I was going for. “You’d come to Japan with me?” he asks.

“I’m already there.”

“I would love that. But then what—I mean I know we can figure something out, but I’m going to be on the road so much and . . . ?”

How can it be so unclear to him when it’s like the fingers on my hand to me? “I’ll be your plus-one,” I tell him. “Your groupie. Your roadie. Your whatever. Wherever you go, I go. If you want that. If you don’t, I understand.”

“No, I want that. Trust me, I want it. But how would that work? With your schedule? With the band?”

I pause. Saying it out loud will finally make it true. “There is no more band. For me, at least, I’m done. After this tour, I’m finished.”

“No!” Louis shakes his head with such force, the strands of his hair bounce. The determined look on his face is one I recognize all too well, and I feel my stomach bottom out. “You can’t do that for me,” he adds, his voice softening. “I won’t take any more free passes.”

“Free passes?”

“For the last three years, everyone, except maybe the Oxford faculty, has given me a free pass. Worse yet, I gave myself a free pass, and that didn’t help me at all. I don’t want to be that person, who just takes things. I’ve taken enough from you. I won’t let you throw away the thing you love so much to be my caretaker or porter.”

“That’s just it,” I murmur. “I’ve sort of fallen out of love with music.”

“Because of me,” Louis says mournfully.

“Because of life,” I reply. “I’ll always play music. I may even record again, but right now I just need some blank time with my guitar to remember why I got into music in the first place. I’m leaving the band whether you’re part of the equation or not. And as for caretaking, if anything, I’m the one who needs it. I’m the one with the baggage.”

I try to make it sound like a joke, but Louis always could see right through my bullshit; the last twenty-four hours have proven that.

He looks at me with those laser beam eyes of his. “You know, I thought about that a lot these last couple of years,” he says in a choked voice. “About who was there for you. Who held your hand while you grieved for all that you’d lost?”

Louis’ words rattle something loose in me and suddenly there are tears all over my damn face again. I haven’t cried in three years and now this is like the second time in as many days.

“It’s my turn to see you through,” he whispers, coming back to me and wrapping me in his blanket as I lose my shit all over again. He holds me until I recover my Y chromosome. Then he turns to me, a slightly faraway look in his eyes. “Your festival’s next Saturday, right?” he asks.

I nod.

“I have the two recitals in Japan and one in Korea on Thursday, so I could be out of there by Friday, and you gain a day back when you travel west. And I don’t have to be at my next engagement in Chicago for another week after that. So if we flew directly from Seoul to London.”

“What are you saying?”

He looks so shy when he asks it, as if there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that I’d ever say no, as if this isn’t what I’ve always wanted.

“Can I come to the festival with you?”


	22. TWENTY-TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiii! Just one more chapter left and it probably will be up tomorrow. :)  
> Hope you have enjoyed it too. xx

“How come I never get to go to any concerts?” Sarah asked.

We were all sitting around the table, Louis, Lauren, Brandon, Sarah, and me, the third child, who’d taken to eating over. You couldn’t blame me. Brandon was a way better cook than my mom.

“What’s that, Little Lady?” Brandon asked, spooning a portion of mashed potatoes onto Sarah’s plate next to the grilled salmon and the spinach that Sarah had tried—unsuccessfully—to refuse.

“I was looking at the old photo albums. And Louis got to go to all these concerts all the time. When he was a baby, even. And I never even got to go to one. And I’m practically eight.”

“You just turned seven five months ago.” Lauren guffawed.

“Still. Louis went before he could walk. It’s not fair!”

“And who ever told you that life was fair?” Lauren asked, raising an eyebrow. “Certainly not me. I am a follower of the School of Hard Knocks.”

Sarah turned toward an easier target. “Dad?”

“Louis went to concerts because they were my shows, Sarah. It was our family time.”

“And you do go to concerts,” Louis said. “You come to my recitals.”

Sarah looked as disgusted as she had when Brandon had served her the spinach. “That doesn’t count. I want to go to loud concerts and wear the Mufflers.” The Mufflers were the giant headphones Louis had worn as a little kid when he’d been taken to Brandon’s old band’s shows. He’d been in a punk band, a very loud punk band.

“The Mufflers have been retired, I’m afraid,” Brandon said. Louis’ dad had long since quit his band. He now was a middle-school teacher who wore vintage suits and smoked pipes.

“You could come to one of my shows,” I said, forking a piece of salmon.

Everyone at the table stopped eating and looked at me, the adult members of the Tomlinson family each giving me a different disapproving look. Brandon just looked tired at the can of worms I’d opened. Lauren looked annoyed for the subversion of her parental authority. And Louis—who, for whatever reason, had this giant churchstate wall between his family and my band—was shooting daggers. Only Sarah—up on her knees in her chair, clapping—was still on my team.

“Sarah can’t stay up that late,” Lauren said.

“You let Louis stay up that late when he was little,” Sarah shot back.

“We can’t stay up that late,” Brandon said wearily.

“And I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Louis huffed.

Immediately, I felt the familiar annoyance in my gut. Because this was the thing I never understood. On one hand, music was this common bond between Louis and me, and me being an all-rock guy had to be part of his attraction. And we both knew that the common ground we’d found at his family’s house—where we hung out all the time—made it like a haven for us. But he’d all but banned his family from my shows. In the year we’d been together, they’d never been. Even though Brandon and Lauren had hinted that they’d like to come, Louis was always making up excuses why this show or that was not the right time.

“Appropriate? Did you just say that it’s not ‘appropriate’ for Sarah to come to my show?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

“Yes, I did.” He couldn’t have sounded more defensive or snippy if he’d tried.

Lauren and Brandon flashed each other a look. Whatever annoyance they’d had with me had turned to sympathy. They knew what Louis’ disapproval felt like.

“Okay, first off, you’re sixteen. You’re not a librarian. So you’re not allowed to say ‘appropriate.’ And second of all, why the hell isn’t it?”

“All right, Sarah,” Lauren said, scooping up Sarah’s dinner plate. “You can eat in the living room in front of the TV.”

“No way, I want to watch this!”

“SpongeBob?” Brandon offered, pulling her by the elbow.

“By the way,” I said to Brandon and Lauren, “the show I was thinking of is this big festival coming up on the coast next month. It’ll be during the day, on a weekend, and outside, so not as loud. That’s why I thought it’d be cool for Sarah. For all of you, actually.”

Lauren’s expression softened. She nodded. “That does sound fun.” Then she gestured to Louis as if to say: But you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

The three of them shuffled out of the kitchen. Louis was slunk all the way down in his chair, looking both guilty and like there was no way in hell he was going to give an inch.

“What’s your problem?” I demanded. “What’s your hang-up with your family and my band? Do you think we suck so badly?”

“No, of course not!”

“Do you resent me and your dad talking music all the time?”

“No, I don’t mind the rock-talk.”

“So, what is it, Louis?”

The tiniest rebel teardrops formed in the edges of his eyes and he angrily swatted them away.

“What? What is the matter?” I asked, softening. Louis wasn’t prone to crocodile tears, or to any tears, really.

He shook his head. Lips sealed shut.

“Will you just tell me? It can’t be worse than what I’m thinking, which is that you’re ashamed of White Eskimo because you think we reek to holy hell.”

He shook his head again. “You know that’s not true. It’s just,” he paused, as if weighing some big decision. Then he sighed. “The band. When you’re with the band, I already have to share you with everyone. I don’t want to add my family to that pot, too.” Then he lost the battle and started to cry.

All my annoyance melted. “You dumb-ass,” I crooned, kissing him on the forehead. “You don’t share me. You own me.”

Louis relented. His whole family came to the festival. It was a fantastic weekend, twenty Northwest bands, not a rain cloud in sight. The whole thing went down in infamy, spawning a live recorded CD and a series of festivals that continue to this day.

Sarah had insisted on wearing the Mufflers, so Lauren had spent an hour grumbling and digging through boxes in the basement until she’d found them.

Louis generally liked to hang backstage at shows but when White Eskimo played, he was right in front of the stage, just clear of the mosh pit, dancing with Sarah the whole time.


	23. TWENTY-THREE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are! Last chapter guys!!  
> Once again thank you for sticking by and leaving comments and kudos! I appreciate!  
> Keep your eyes peeled some exciting thing are going to happen :)  
> Hope to see you on my other works! Love x

I got a heart and I got a soul

Believe me I wanna use them both

We made a start be it a false one I know

Baby I don’t want to feel alone

“18”

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, TRACK 1

When our flight lands in London, it’s pissing down rain, so it feels like home to both of us. It’s five in the afternoon when we get in. We’re due at the BBC Music Festival that evening. We play the next night. Then it’s countdown till total freedom. Louis and I have worked out a schedule for the next three months while I’m touring and he’s touring, breaks here and there where we can overlap, visit, see each other. It’s not going to be delightful, but compared to the last three years, it’ll still feel like heaven.

It’s past eight when we get to the hotel. I’ve asked Paul to book me at the same place as the rest of the band, not just for the festival but the duration of the tour. Whatever their feelings are going to be about my leaving White Eskimo, sleeping two miles away ain’t gonna minimize them. I haven’t mentioned Louis to Paul or anyone, and miraculously, we’ve managed to keep his name out of the tabloids so far. No one seems to know that I’d spent the last week in Asia with him. Everyone was too busy buzzing about Kendall’s new love interest, some Australian actor.

There’s a note at the front desk informing me that the band is having a private dinner in the atrium and asking me to join them. I suddenly feel like I’m being led to my execution and after the fifteen-hour trip from Seoul would like nothing more than to shower first, just maybe see them tomorrow. But Louis has his hand on my side. “No, you should go.”

“You come, too?” I feel bad asking him. He just played three intensely amazing and crazily well-received concerts in Japan and Korea and then flew halfway around the world and directly into my psychodrama. But all of this will be bearable if he’s with me.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“Trust me, if anyone’s intruding, it’s me.”

The bellman grabs our stuff to take to our room, and the concierge leads us across the lobby. The hotel is in an old castle, but it’s been taken over with rockers and a bunch of different musicians nod and “hey” me, but I’m too nervous right now to respond. The concierge leads us to a dimly lit atrium. The band’s all in there, along with a giant buffet serving a traditional English roast.

Liam turns around first. Things haven’t been the same between the two of us since that Stockholm Syndrome tour, but the look he gives me now, I don’t know how to describe it: Like I’m his biggest disappointment in life, but he tries to rise above it, to tamp it down, to act all casual, like I’m just one of the fans, one of the hangerson, one of the many people who want something from him that he’s not obliged to give. “Harry,” he says with a curt nod.

“Liam,” I begin cautiously.

“Hey, asshole! Nice of you to join us!” Niall’s irrepressible voice is both sarcastic and welcoming, like he just can’t decide which way to go.

Zayn doesn’t say anything. He just pretends I don’t exist.

And then I feel the brush of Louis’ shoulder as he steps out from behind me. “Hi, guys,” he says.

Liam’s face goes completely blank for a moment. Like he doesn’t know who Louis is. Then he looks scared, like he’s just seen a ghost. Then my strong, tough, butchy drummer—his lower lip starts to tremble, and then his face crumples. “Louis?” he asks, his voice quavering. “Louis?” he asks louder this time. “Louis!” he says, the tears streaming down his face right before he tackles my boy in a hug.

When he’s released him, he holds Louis at arm’s length and looks at him and then back at me and then back at Louis. “Louis?” he shouts, both asking and answering his own question. Then he turns to me. And if I’m not forgiven, then at least I’m understood.

The rain keeps up throughout the next day. “Lovely English summer we’re having,” everyone jokes. It’s become my habit to barricade myself at these types of giant festivals, but realizing that this is probably my last one for a while, at least as a participant, I slip inside the grounds, listen to some of the bands on the side stages, catch up with some old friends and acquaintances, and even talk to a couple of rock reporters. I’m careful not to mention the breakup of the band. That’ll come out in time, and I’ll let everyone else decide how to release this news. I do, however, briefly comment on Kendall’s and my split, which is all over the tabloids anyhow. Asked about my new mystery man, I simply say “no comment.” I know this will all come out soon enough, and while I want to spare Louis the circus, I don’t care if the whole world knows we’re together.

By the time our nine P.M. slot rolls around, the rain has subsided to a soft mist that seems to dance in the late summer twilight. The crowd has long since accepted the slosh. There’s mud everywhere and people are rolling around in it like it’s Woodstock or something.

Before the set, the band was nervous. Festivals do that to us. A bigger ante than regular concerts, even stadium shows—festivals have exponentially larger crowds, and crowds that include our musician peers. Except tonight, I’m calm. My chips are all cashed out. There’s nothing to lose. Or maybe I’ve already lost it and found it, and whatever else there might be to lose, it’s got nothing to do with what’s on this stage. Which might explain why I’m having such a good time out here, pounding through our new songs on my old Les Paul Junior, another piece of history brought back from the dead. Liam did a double take when he saw me pull it out of its old case. “I thought you got rid of that thing,” he’d said.

“Yeah, me too,” I’d replied, tossing off a private smile at Louis.

We race through the new album and then throw in some bones from Stockholm Syndrome and before I know it, we’re almost at the end of the set. I look down at the set list that’s duct-taped to the front of the stage. Scrawled there in Liam’s block lettering is the last song before we leave for the inevitable encore. “18.” Our anthem, our old producer Julian Bunetta, called it. The saddest screed on Stockholm Syndrome, critics called it. Probably our biggest hit of all. It’s a huge crowd-pleaser on tours because of the chorus, which audiences love to chant.

It’s also one of the few songs we’ve ever done with any kind of production, a strings section of violins right at the top of the recorded track, though we don’t have those for the live version. So as we launch into it, it’s not that rolling howl of the crowd’s excitement that I hear, but the sound of his piano playing in my head. For a second, I have this vision of just the two of us in some anonymous hotel room somewhere dickering around, he on his piano, me on my guitar, playing this song I wrote for him. And shit, if that doesn’t make me so damn happy.

I sing the song with all I’ve got. Then we get to the chorus: I have loved you since we were 18. Long before we both thought the same thing. To be loved and to be in love. And all I can do is say that these arms were made for holding you. I wanna love like you made me feel. When we were 18.

On the album, the chorus is repeated over and over, a rasp of fury and sadness, and it’s become a thing during shows for me to stop singing and turn the mic out toward the audience and let them take over. So I turn the mic toward the fields, and the crowd just goes insane, singing my song, chanting my plea.

I leave them at it and I take a little walk around the stage. The rest of the band sees what’s going on so they just keep repping the chorus. When I get closer to the side of the stage, I see him there, where he always felt most comfortable, though for the foreseeable future, he’ll be the one out here in the spotlight, and I’ll be the one in the wings, and that feels right, too.

The audience keeps singing, keeps making my case, and I just keep strumming until I get close enough to see his eyes. And then I start singing the chorus. Right to him. And he smiles at me, and it’s like we’re the only two people out here, the only ones who know what’s happening. Which is that this song we’re all singing together is being rewritten. It’s no longer sad plea shouted to the void. Right here, on this stage, in front of eighty thousand people, it’s becoming something else.

This is our new vow.

**Author's Note:**

> Open your hearts to me on [tumblr](http://arrow-to-my-heart.tumblr.com/).


End file.
